LIBRARY OF CONGRESS: 






,T7 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



PEER OF pGIOUS IDEAS 



THEIR ULTIMATE 



THE EELIGION OF SCIENCE. 



BY HUDSON TUTTLE, 

AUTHOE OF " OEIGIN AND ANTIQUITY OF MAN," " CAEEEE OF THE 

GOD-IDEA," " CAEEEE OF THE CHEIST-IDEA," "ABCANA 

OF NATUEE," ETC., ETC. 



Historians of that which is, we cannot fail, except when we 
cease to relate the truth.— Etienne Geoffboy St. Hiliaee. 

How beautiful this light 1 it seems to beckon earth to heav- 
en.— Alex Humboldt. 



D. M. BENNETT: 

LIBERAL AND SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHING HOUSE. 

141 Eighth Street, New York. 

1878. 



7? 



Copyright Secured. 



^> 



PREFACE. 



It is time Science be heard in the discussion of man's 
moral relations here and immortal relations in the here- 
after. Having driven metaphysics from the field of mat 
ter, it essays to enter the realm of spirit, accounting for 
mental and moral results by unvarying law. Over this 
mysterious domain exact knowledge must extend its sway. 
If there is a spirit -world, it is governed by fixed laws. If 
there is a spirit-existence., it must be evolved out of phy- 
sical life according to determinate methods, and all moral 
principles must have their bases in the constitution of the 
world. My earnest desire is that this work may be met 
with the same uncompromising love of truth with which 
it deals with time-old theories. H. T. 



RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 



FUNDAMENTAL RELIGIOUS PROPOSITION. 

Man was created a perfect being in a perfect world, by a 
direct and miraculous act of an Infinite God, and by disobe- 
dience brought sin and death into the world, thereby 
becoming estranged and lost from God, an uttterly depraved 
and fallen creature. 



DEPENDENT PROPOSITIONS. 

1st. As he sinned against an Infinite Being, his sin is infi- 
nite, and requires an infinite sacrifice. 

2d. God, as the only Infinite Being, is alone capable of 
making such sacrifice. 

3d. God incarnated and offered himself as such atoning 
sacrifice, and became a mediator between himself and sinful 
man to save the world. 

4th. The efficacy of this mediation depends on faith. 

5th. Man is a free agent, and can choose by his own free 
will between good and evil. 



10 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

6th. Endowed with life and immortality, through the 
arbitrary will and for the pleasure of God, man's free 
choice brings on himself reward or punishment. 

7th. Mortal life is a state of probation; immortality, a 
miraculous gift of God, for the purposes of reward and 
punishment. 

8th. He gave the Bible as a direct revelation of his will 
to man, as the only and infallible guide by which lost man- 
can be saved. 



RESULTS. 

A priesthood ; superstition ; bigotry ; persecution ; sup- 
pression of knowledge ; and the arrogance of infallibility. 



FUNDAMENTAL SCIENTIFIC PROPOSITION. 

Man was evolved from lower forms of being, and has 
progressed from the lowest estate to his present civilization 
by inherent growth, and is the expression of fixed and un- 
changing laws. 

DEPENDENT PROPOSITIONS. 

1st. Man has never fallen from a state of perfection— 
never has been, nor can be, estranged or lost from God. 

2d. The only possible mediatorship that can exist be- 
tween man and God is knowledge. 

3d. Sin, or evil, is imperfection, which can only be eradi- 
cated by normal growth. Man is, and must be, his own 
savior. 



PRIMARY PROPOSITIONS. 11 

4th. A creature of organization, and subject to unchang- 
ing laws, man, in the ohurch sense, is not a free agent, nor 
has he a free will. His apparent free agency is based on 
the combination of forces bv which he became an indi- 
vidual. 

5th. Mortal life is not probationary ; immortality is not 
bestowed, but evolved from and a direct continuance of the 
physical being, by laws as sharply denned and as unchange- 
able. 

6th. The only infallible authority is Nature rightly inter- 
preted by Reason. 



RESULTS. 

Nobility of life ; highest ideal aspiration for perfection ; 
calm reliance in the presence of universal and omnipotent 
forces ; all-embracing charity and philanthropy; an earnest 
and successful endeavor to actualize the ideal perfect life 
rendered possible by his organization. 



s 



CHAPTER I. 

1NTB0DUGT0BY. 

That matter called the Christian religion was in existence 
among the ancients; it has never been wanting since the 
beginning of the human race.—Si. Augustine. 

Change rides upon the wings of Time— 

A regal artist, dumb and still, 
Who visits God's remotest clime, 
And sculptures matter to her will. 

—Emma Tattle. 

History yields no example of a motive actuating man 
stronger than religion. To it all the most holy and sacred 
emotions of the heart bow in abject servitude. Love of 
friends, of family, of country, is as nothing compared with 
religious faith. The tender appeal of childhood, the fond 
embrace of conjugal affection, the pleading voice of frater- 
nal ties, are at once cast aside by the devotee blind to all 
perception, and calloused to all the influences which usually 
sway the human heart. Bound to the stake, the martyr 
smiles at the excruciating pain, and his soul ascends in the 
lurid flames chanting hymns of victory. It is one of the 
first faculties awakened in the mind — Protean in its forms, 
and ever triumphant. The hero who unwavering rushes 
against serried ranks of bayonets, or unappalled storms the 
redoubt crowned with deep-throated cannon, condemned by 
his religion, quaking with fear, falls prostrate, and with 
white lips cries frantically for pardon to an offended God. 
Religion demands monasteries filled with monks, and con- 
vents with nuns, vowed to celibacy; and thousands rush to 
their lonely cells, and suffer through their mortal lives the 

13 



14 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

imposition of the most revolting requirements. It asks the 
wife to ascend the funeral pyre of her husband, and she her- 
self applies the torch. It asks its devotee to cast himself 
^ into the Ganges, or beneath the Car of Juggernaut, and its 
voice is obeyed with joy. It destroys the humanity of its 
recipient, transforming him into a blind fanatic, and too 
often an avenging fiend who will sacrifice all the human 
heart holds dear on the altar of its faith. 

Such being its wonderful power, we ask, What is Relig- 
ion ? 
i The world gives a multitude of diverse answers. In the 
sense in which the word is usually employed, it means the 
peculiar beliefs in the form and essence of G-od, and the 
ceremonials of his worship, entertained by any particular 
people. In this sense it is distinct from morality, which 
relates to actual life. Each great race of mankind, by 
organization evolving a different mentality and a varying 
moral code, answers the question after its own manner. 
The Hindoo says religion consists in believing on Christna 
and the Holy Books, in keeping caste with the scrupulous- 
ness of olden times, observing the ceremonies prescribed, 
repeating long prayers, pilgrimages to holy cities and 
rivers, and blind obedience to the priesthood. 

The Persian answers that belief in Zoroaster and the 
sacred Zend Avesta, the repetition of prayers, and the feed- 
ing of the sacred fires, are all essential. 

The Chinese would have us believe in Confucius; the 
Moslem, in Mohammed; the Jew, in Moses and the Proph- 
ets. The Hindoo has his Shaster; the Persian, his Zend 
Avesta; the Mohammedan, his Al-Koran; the Jew, his Old 
Testament; the Christian, his 2STew Testament — all claiming 
divine and infallible inspiration. All have their divine men 
— their saviors — to believe on whom is sufficient for salva- 
tion. Each has a supreme God jealous of other people's 
gods. Brahma, Ormuzd, Jehovah, apparently all rest on 
the same foundation — blind faith. Christianity is not a 



WHAT IS RELIGION ? 15 

unit in its answer. There is a wide disparity between Cath- 
olic and Protestant, and the sects into which the latter is 
divided reply with countless discordant voices. 

The Mother Church replies: Belief in the divinity of 
Jesus and the virginity of Mary, crucifixion of the body, 
punctual attendance at church, and hearty belief and coop- 
eration in the forms of its fantastic worship. 

The Protestants cry: Faith, grace, baptism, belief in this 
or that impossibility, until in the confusion it is impossible 
to decide. If baptism is essential, either immersion or 
sprinkling is wrong, and the followers of one or the other 
of these modes are not fulfilling God's law. If good deeds 
are worthless and faith is everything, those who rely on an 
upright life have built their house on the sands. Should 
good deeds prove of more avail than faith, the opposite 
host must eternally suffer. 

All — Brahmin, Buddhist, Persian, Moslem, Jew, Cath- 
olic, Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist, down to the smallest 
and most obscure sect — are equally willing to sanctify and 
prove their dogmas with their lives. Martyrs are the cheap- 
est product of mankind, and the most meaningless. They have 
sealed with their blood the greatest follies with a zeal which 
proves nothing but their ignorance and fanaticism. 

Ah, Religion I are you only a name, changeable to the 
varying requirements of the time — the convenience and 
selfishness of men? Broad and deep has been the gulf 
between religion and morality, and a designing priesthood 
has ever sought to deepen and widen it, and break down 
any bridge adventurous thinkers might seek to throw 
across. Obedience to all moral commands, unless such 
obedience has special reference to the Divine will, is 
not religion, which is "real piety in practice, consisting in 
the performance of all known duties to God and our fellow 
men, in obedience to Divine command, or from love to God 
and his law. " 

The questions arise : What is obedience ? How are we to 



16 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS lf>EAS. 

know the will of God ? What duties do we owe to him ? 
What is piety ? 

This definition is as broad as the world, and as narrow as 
the most selfish bigot can wish. It applies to the pow-wow 
of the Red Indian as well as to the prayers of Christians — 
the pilgrimage to Mecca as well as that to the Holy Sepul- 
chre. To be religious is to observe the methods of worship 
of one's country. A Mohammedan may be very pious at 
Constantinople, but he would be an Infidel in New York. 
At Constantinople the Pope himself would be an Infidel 
dog. The pious Trinitarian does not consider the Unita- 
rian better than an Infidel. Religion is, then, the worship 
of Joss-sticks — not for ourselves, but to please God. 

God is a caricature. The Infinite One becomes offended 
and displeased if we do not sink our selfhood in him. 
Infinite selfishness is his predominant quality. Let oblivion 
conceal from the blushing day this detestable sham 1 Bury 
deep this Christians' God, to be unearthed in future centu- 
ries, and studied as the geologist now studies the fossil 
monsters of the primeval time ! 

Out of this slough there is one method of escape — by 
another assertion. The Bible furnishes a code, God-given, 
which man must obey. This satisfies until other races pro- 
duce their several sacred books, with equally positive 
evidence of their truthfulness; and it is learned that all the 
vital moral precepts were well understood before these 
sacred books were written, and that unless the capabilities 
for morality exist in the mind, there cam be no revelation of 
moral obligations even by a God. 

The religious views entertained by the Christian world 
are a stupendous chain of unwarrantable, insupportable, 
and baseless assertions. Getting lost from God, getting 
saved, getting nearer to Gcd, being restored to God, and 
being lost from God, form a mass of verbiage, meaningless 
and false. Can a man be lost from an all -pervading, infinite 
Father ? 



RELIGION ACCORDING TO THE CHURCH. l7 

Not only is such a leligion humiliating — it is absolutely 
immoral. The ceremony quickly comes to stand for the 
practice of virtue; the ritual takes the place of deeds ; the 
man is encased in impenetrable formulae, and truth departs. 

The Bible is interpreted by the sects very differently. If 
our eternal salvation depends on obeying the laws of God 
for our own sake, the choice of the 6ect with which we cast 
our fortunes, and the interpretation we accept, are fraught 
with momentous consequences— no less than our eternal 
uappmess or misery. l 7 et are we left to stumble in dark- 
ness and doubt, and find it impossible to decide from the 
evidence furnished us. Whose fault is it — the Infidel's who 
cannot receive the evidence, or the Infinite God's who fur- 
nishes it in so imperfect a manner ? If God has made a 
revelation, it is because he saw its necessity, and a part of 
that necessity is that it must be in such a form as will be 
received; otherwise it answers not the ends designed, and is 
useless. 

On the Bible, as an absolute inspiration from God, the 
Christian Churches found their claims. As they discard 
reason, they have no right to use it in determining the 
character of this revelation. By their acknowledgment 
that man cannot gain a knowledge of truth by other 
methods, they are compelled to base their systems an its 
authority. Having thus planted themselves, tkey one and 
all arrogate dictatorship in religious matters. They claim 
the power of commendation and denunciation. Even the 
most liberal in their creeds and dogmatic formulae make this 
claim. They are right; all who disagree are wrong, and sub- 
jects for hell. Keligion consists in belief in these peculiar 
tenets. The Catholic regards all Protestants as led astray 
by the Evil One, while the Protestant feels assured that the 
Catholic Church is the Scarlet Woman of Babylon. Both 
summarily condemn the Freethinker, the philosopher, and 
the scientist, as hopeless Infidels. Such is the force of 
education, that the arrogance of the Church has been in a 



18 CAKEEll OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

measure acquiesced in, and a tacit admission of her right 
granted ; but we ask how and when the Church received 
such power. 

What is the Church ? An aggregation of individuals for 
the object of religious instruction and propagation of relig- 
ious ideas. The Christian- Churches gather around the 
conception of Christ an incarnation of God. Their author- 
ity is the Bible. But the Bible nowhere even mentions a 
church in the modern sense. Jesus, so far from being a 
model of, was the antipodes of church spirit. He gathered 
a few fishermen around him, and taught wherever he found 
a willing mind to receive. Re cast, aside all ceremonies 
and rites. The observance of the Sabbath was to him an 
idle tale. He abolished the sacrifices, the prayer at set 
times and seasons, leaving only the absolute principles of 
morality. He bestowed no power on his disciples that the 
most ordinary men did net possess. The most successful 
missionary in his cause was one of those sent forth. Is the 
whole strength of argument confined to the text founding 
the Church on Simon Peter ? Its spurious origin is too 
well proven to leave a doubt. 

Nowhere in the Gospels has Christ sanctioned anything 
but pure and exalted morality. Baptism and the Supper 
were only accidents, and nowhere recommended as essen- 
tial. Where, then, can the Church found its claims to 
infallible direction of the beliefs of men? Not on the 
Bible ; not on anything Christ said or # did. His life is a 
plain denial of all they claim. 

The Church has acted from the commencement of its 
existence as though it held a commission from God to 
scourge all who opposed its exactions, and torture them into 
the road it said led to heaven. The Protestant sects, hav- 
ing lost the irresistible power of the Pope, still rely on the 
withering influence of excommunication, and the social 
pressure they wield. They cannot place the Infidel on a 
rack and tear his limbs to pieces, but they can torture his 



THE AUTHORITY OF THE CHURCH - DEFINED. 19 

spirit by social ostracism, the influence of which lies in the 
prejudices they create. 

When a thinker walks out on the breezy highlands of 
untrammeled thought, and would gladden the world with 
the spectacle of a beautiful life devoted to noble aims and 
lofty endeavors, how rave the sectarian winds over the theo- 
logical marshlands betfow! and how ten thousand tongues 
run swift to defame his fair name ! The calm soul will let 
them prate, as the unnoticeable anger of children. 

We learn, then, that the claims of the Church to author- 
ity in matters pertaining to religion are without the least 
foundation. They are not sanctioned by the Gospels, nor 
authorized by any word or deed of Christ, but everywhere 
condemned. 'Not can it, as an aggregation of individuals, 
claim authority over any individual who does not consent 
to such dictation. All authority thus gained is that be- 
stowed by the brute strength of numbers. 

It may be answered : These numbers are not individual 
aggregations, but they gather around a centre — that centre 
the God-man, Christ. The power of the Church arises 
from its holding this being as a model for human action. 
If Christ were a veritable incarnation— if he were God 
clothed in flesh — he could not be a model for finite man. 
His example would be useless and wholly incomprehensi- 
ble. If he were simply a good and perfect man, it would 
be well for us to follow his example, and so would it be 
well to learn lessons from all exemplary men. 

Thus, as a God or as a man, no power is conferred on his 
followers, by accepting him as a model, to enforce their 
views on others, or to reject what they may consider as 
conflicting with their established beliefs. 

All authority that the Church has is that of brute power: 
nothing divinely delegated, but human and bestowed by 
might. 

This right is admitted, not because it is supported by 
evidence, but by that blind obedience men pay to the old, 



20 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

which grows out of fear, admiration, and a sense of duty, 
the result of education. 

The Church has the appliances to create fear in an emi. 
nent degree. Added to those usually attending leaders, 
political or theological, it holds the keys of hell and eternal 
damnation in its hands. The soul that bravely submits to 
physical torture is appalled at threats of eternal anguish. 
This element is chiefly relied on and is largely used in all 
revivals, and its thunder tones are heard in excommunica- 
tions and anathemas. Mankind are loyal to their leaders, 
whether those leaders direct them right or wrong, and once 
imbued with certain notions, they are ready to sustain those 
leaders, from admiration of the success with which they 
carry forward their measures. One generation having sub- 
mitted, the next is educated into submission, or, in other 
words, they have a sense of the moral duty of obedience. 

Having by these means gained supremcy, the Church has 
attempted to preserve her power by two quite different 
methods. Thoroughly comprehending that knowledge is 
power, it has either sought to check its diffusion altogether, 
or only to disseminate such ideas as it pleased. 

The universal dissemination of knowledge, it was held, 
was not only useless, but led to discontent, sedition, and 
revolution. The masses, if allowed to be informed in the 
arts and sciences of the ruling classes, would become turbu- 
lent and uncontrollable. The High Church party in 
England maintained this view until a recent date, and the 
supporters of slavery upheld it with most stringent laws. 
The other method, the deeper and more insidious, intro- 
duced by the more ultra leaders of Protestantism, and by 
the Jesuits into Catholicism, is to compel all to become edu- 
cated, making it even compulsory with parents to instruct 
their children. At the same time, while opening the doors 
of the mind, care is taken of the mental food supplied. An 
injunction is served on the press and the author. No book 
or paper is issued until examined by the theological power, 



THE CHURCH AND EDUCATION. 21 

and if containing anything displeasing, it cannot appear. 
Authors tv ho write in accordance with prevailing ideas are 
encouraged to occupy the public mind, the press thus be- 
coming a power in the hands of the Church to disseminate its 
doctrines and maintain its authx rity. It vomits forth tracts 
and religious books by the million, but to every call from 
any conflicting idea is silent. It is not only gagged, it is 
made a slave, and all its giant energy compelled to labor for 
darkness instead of light. 

The school has been supplied with books written in the 
service of the Church, to the exclusion of others, and every 
avenue to knowledge seized with rapacious hand. The pri- 
mary school, the seminary, the college, if not publicly 
leaching theology, are controlled by theologians. 

Wise and subtle as this scheme appeared, they who em- 
ployed it knew not wherewith they built. The mind 
becomes enlarged and its perceptions sharpened even by 
erroneous learning. After receiving the knowledge pre- 
pared by the priesthood, it gains increased capacity; and 
one ray of light allowed to enter creates a desire for the 
whole sunshine. The New England common schools, of 
which those of other States are copies, were established 
chiefly to maintain Puritan orthodoxy; but they have in a 
great measure escaped from the controlling hand of the 
Church, and from them have flowed the heresies which 
have degraded its power and led to the Freethought of the 
present. May we soon rejoice for the day when they shall 
become wholly secularized, and the light of knowledge, 
instead of revealing the horrid machinery of theology to the 
ardent imaginations of the young, be allowed to shine as 
the sun of morning over the beauties of Nature. 

NeitVer the Church nor any organization having the 
right to decide what is truth, man is thrown on his own 
resources for its determination. Granting the dogma of 
miraculous creation, every organ and function of man is 
designed and created for pleasure— not for pain— and it is 



22 CAREER OP RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

v essential that an All-wise Being make him an authority to 

himself. If not, how is it possible for him to receive the 
revelation of his Maker? Here we leave the dark night- 
land, where, in the miasmatic gloom of ignorance and dank 
vapors of superstition, theology grows like a fetid mush- 
room, and with relief gain the heights of untrammeled 
thought, where religion becomes moral obligation. Not to 
systems, but to the mind itself, are we to turn for the 
understanding of religion. The meaning of that word can 
be exalted. The true religious code and the moral are one. 
The most moral man is the most religious. Everything 
outside of a well-ordered life— a life devpted to the most 
perfect accomplishment of the object of being, under the 
name of whatever religion— is a sham. Religion is the cit- 
adel in which emotional ignorance has entrenched itself, 
and fought to the death every advance of knowledge, 
which, expressed in the general term of science, is the true 
savior of mankind. 

"Ahl" it is replied, " science is well in its place, but in 
morals and religion it is at fault: they are beyond its pale." 
The worshiper of beans and garlics under the shadow of 
the Pyramids made the same statement four thousand years 
ago. Religion is the province of unreasoning faith, and the 
greater the faith required, the more miraculous the system 
and laudable the unwavering faith of the devotee. Faith is 
another name for credulity, and is most reprehensible. 

The weapons of metaphysical theology are now useless. 
The war has changed its base. It has been fought on the 
damp marshlands of ignorance, and the combatants have 
been guided by will-o'-the-wisps, which they mistook for 
stars of heaven. Now the light of certain knowledge floods 
the world, and the systc ns of theology and i,*jtaphysics 
disappear. They can never change front and battle with 
new weapons. Knowledge not only destroys dogmatism ; it 
renders its existence impossible. The Goliaths of theology 
arrayed on the battle-Held of science, become phantasms, 



KNOWLEDGE THE TRUE SAVIOB. 23 

the attenuated shadows of ghosts, which amuse rather than 
annoy with their incoherent gibberish. 

Knowledge carries men away from Churchianity. The 
leading minds of Europe and America stand outside of its 
influence. Yet they and their followers form the most 
moral members in their respective societies. The drifting 
away of the dross of dogmatism leaves the true gold of 
morality. 

In these pages the [p*eat questions of religion and moral- 
ity are treated by knc wledge, and not by faith. No obscure 
region is covered by the "mystery of G-odliness." The 
only mystery admitted is that of Ignorance. By religion is 
meant all systems, and Christianity will be weighed in the 
same balance with Mohammedanism, Buddhism, and the 
lowest Fetishism. If it stand the test, it is well; if not, 
why mourn? As from the mind of man has sprung all the 
systems of the past, he is superior to them as the master to 
his work, and adequate to the production of the systems 
essential to his future progress. The essential cannot be 
destroyed. Fetish gods only need to be jealously guarded. 



CHAPTER II. 

WHAT IS RELIGION? 

The way to gain admission into the portals of science is 
through the portal of doubt— Socrates. 

He that takes away reason to make way for revelation puts 
out the light of both, and does much the same as if he should 
persuade a man to put out his eyes the better to receive the 
remote light of an invisible star by a telescope.— Locke. 

If religion be devotion to and awe of personified life and 
intelligence, it is possessed by the brutes of the field. 

Europe, with all her nameless store 

Of cultivation, wisdom, pride, 
Had marched through centuries of gore 

Before she reached the lighted side 
Of God's humanity. Her veins. 

Though pure, have run barbaric blood; 
Her fair face has worn pits and stains; 

But change wrought error into good, 

— Gazelle. 

The asser^on that religious phenomena are found among 
all races of mankind has been a standard argument to prove 
that man, by necessity of his organization, is a religious be- 
ing, and that worship in some form is indispensable. Un- 
doubtedly this is one of the strongest arguments possible to 
urge, and if received as expressing the fact that no mental 
phenomena can be manifested without an adequate cause 
residing in the mind, is indisputable. Furthermore, and a 
fact of great significance, religious feelings and observances 
become refined and elevated, and tend to disappear in mor- 
ality, in exact ratio to the advance of reason and knowledge. 
There are shades of progress, from the Patagonian, the sum 

24 



MAH S PRIMITIVE STATE. 25 

of whose religion is roasting a sea-bird's egg and singing a 
wild song over it, to the refined subtleties of the Evangelist. 
The existence of such feelings is not a proof of their mu- 
nificence, or that they should be uncontrolled. War 
appears normal to all mankind, and is even more universal 
than religion, going down through the successive grades of 
the animal world to the lowest. Its existence proves that 
man possesses combative elements in his nature, which, 
properly directed by reason, exert a salutary influence. It 
does not prove a separate faculty of war, but arises from a 
.ombination of faculties which an advanced civilization 
employs quite differently. 

The existence of religious feelings proves no more than 
the love of war. We are not sure we cannot discover inti- 
mations of religion in animals themselves. When the wild 
winds blow, and the lightnings fill the black clouds with 
fire, and the air is rent with thunder, how piteously the 
brutes of the field fly here and there, uttering their plaint- 
ive moans, or rush into the presence of man, trembling 
with fear! 

The first germ of religion in savage man is this same fear 
of the elements. Under like circumstances he cries with 
terror and falls prostrate, appealing for protection to some- 
thing, he knows not what. Is there any difference in kind 
between the fear of the brute and that of the savage? The 
animal throws itself under the protection of man; the sav- 
age, having no visible superior to whom to appeal, personi- 
fies the elements themselves, and casts himself before the 
ideal of his own creation. 

Those who regard man as fallen from a high estate see in 
the savage, not a primitive, but a degraded condition. 
This conclusion conflicts with the facts of human history. 
The races of mankind began, like the individual, ignorant 
and brutal. The early man was a savage, a cannibal, 
whose religion — if he possessed a religion— was of the 



26 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

grossest form. Our pride may revolt against such a view of 
our ancestors, but it makes it no better by denying it, and 
it is flattering to know that man is subject to progressive 
growth and unlimited achievements. Fetishism has been 
considered the lowest expression of religious instinct, but 
it does not touch the bottom of the abyss. Comte fails to 
meet the issue when he declares this statement insup- 
portable. He combats a positive subject with metaphysical 
argument. He says if man existed in a state wholly ^mate- 
rial, there must have been " a time when intellectual wants 
did not exist in man; and we must suppose a moment when 
they began to exist, without any prior manifestation." This ■ 
he concludes impossible. His argument is of that meta- 
physical kind, as delusive as unsatisfactory, which the 
author utterly discards in others. The "want " is subject 
to an imperceptibly slow growth. The appearance of the 
" want " is evidence of the prior capability for its develop- 
ment, and there must be a time when this development 
becomes manifest. % 

Fetishism is not the first expression of the religious senti- 
ment. There are many species of animals in which it is 
apparent, especially in those which have had the advantage 
of*the culture given by man. A kitten mistakes a ball for 
a living being as readily as a savage sees a life like his own 
in the wind. The thoughts awakened in the mind of a 
dog by presenting a watch to his ear are of the same kind — 
he regards it as a living being; the savage thinks it pos- 
sessed by a demon. A Bechuana, seeing the sea and a ship 
for the first time, said the ship must have come of itself, 
for it could not have been created by man. The Yakats 
are represented as being so amazed by the action of a tele- 
scope in bringing distant objects close to the eye, that they 
believe it possessed by a spirit; writing they cannot compre- 
hend, and books they regard as living objects that can talk. 

In our own individual development we can mark the 
same ideas in our childhood. They even extend to our 



DAWX OF THE RELIGIOUS IDEA. 27 

mature years; and when a machine refuses to do its work, 
how readily the mechanic gives it personality! The child 
converts a broomstick into a prancing steed, and the engi- 
neer speaks of his locomotive as a person for whom he has 
the warmest attachment. The child chastises the offending 
object; Xerxes, leading the myriads of Persia, would send 
a message to the turbulent sea, and bind it with chains. 
These arc examples of the lowest Fetishism— the endow- 
ment of inanimate objects wi;h life. 

TVe have advanced so far from that primitive faith that 
we cannot study its peculiar phases without referring to 
people who are at present in the same stage as that which 
we have left in the remote distance. As human develop- 
ment is governed by the same unchanging laws, similar- 
stages of growth present corresponding phenomena. As in 
a forest the connection between the acorn and the oak can 
be traced through the intermediate forms of growth, the 
civilized man stands connected with the savage. 

This held of study is lamentably broad, as only a moiety 
of mankind have become what is styled civilized, and at 
least one-third of the human family are savages. Those 
vast regions forming the continents of Africa and Australia, 
the countless islands of the Pacific, and the interminable 
expanse around the North Pole, in America extending 
southward almost to the Great Lakes, are inhabited by rud- 
est tribes, whose religious beliefs are of the grossest form. 
The Australian has not made an attempt towards embody- 
ing his religious ideas, if he has any, in rites and ceremo- 
nies. (Latham.) Certain wild songs, accompanied with 
gestures, mistaken for such, have proved of foreign origin. 
Even missionaries, eager to discover analogous ideas in the 
heathen they would convert, have honestly expressed their 
perplexity. Says one: "They have no idea of a Divine 
Being. They have no comprehension of the things they 
commit to memory. I mean especially as regards religious 
subjects. 5 ' Another remarks* "What can we do with a 



48 CAREER OP RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

nation whose language presents no terms corresponding to 
justice or sin, and to whose minds the ideas expressed by 
these words are completely strange and inexplicable?" "A 
kind of highly developed instinct for discovering their food 
which is always difficult for them to obtain, seems among 
them to have taken the place of most of the moral faculties 
among mankind/' is the statement of Lesson and Garnot. 
Unless watched by the police, they would offend law and 
decency with as little scruple as the monkeys of a menag- 
erie; and so dormant is their reason, that the same "means 
must be employed to convince them that is used with chil- 
dren and idiots. 

The inhabitants of Central Africa are little more ad- 
vanced. 

Leighton, who for four years served as missionary among 
the Mpongwes, Mandingos, and Grebos, important tribes, 
says that they have neither priests, nor idolatry, nor relig- 
ious ceremonies. The testimony of Livingstone on the 
Bechuanas is the same. In order to translate the word God 
and make it comprehensible to Caffre intellect, the mission- 
aries had to employ the word Tixo, meaning "wounded 
knee." Tixo was a well-known sorcerer, and received his 
name from a wound received on his knee. He was the 
highest ideal of the Caffre mind, and his name best trans- 
lated the idea of God to their understanding. 

Of the Esquimaux, people depressed by the cold as the 
preceding are by excessive heat, Sir John Koss speaks in no 
flattering terms as regards their religious status : — 

"Did they comprehend anything of all I attempted to 
explain, explaining the simplest things in the simplest man 
ner I could devise? I could not conjecture. Should I have 
gained more had I understood their language? I have 
much reason to doubt. That they have a moral law of 
some extent, * written in the heart,' I could not doubt, as 
numerous traits of their conduct show; but beyond this I 
ould satisfy myself of nothing; nor did these efforts and 



THE LOWEST SAVAGE HAS NO RELIGION. 29 

many more enable me to conjecture aught worth recording. 
Respecting their opinions on the essential points from 
which I might have presumed on a religion, I was obliged 
at present to abandon the attempt, and I was inclined to 
despair. 

" The Esquimaux is an animal of prey, with no other en- 
joyment than eating ; and, guided by no principle and no 
reason, he devours as long as he can, and all that he can 
procure, like the vulture and the tiger. The Esquimaux 
ea*s but to sleep, and sleeps but to eat again as soon as 
he can." 

South of the Himalayas, in the dense forests of Central 
Hindoostan, man exists in lower caste than has yet else- 
where been described. Mr. Piddington, who had extensive 
experience of travel, describes one of these remarkable 
people, whom the Hindoos call " monkey-men ": 

4t He was short, flat-nosed, had pouch-like wrinkles in 
semicircles round the corners of the mouth and cheeks ; 
his arms were disproportionately long, and there was a por- 
tion of reddish hair to be seen on the rusty black skin. 
Altogether, if couched in a dark corner or on a tree, he 
might be mistaken for a large oran-utan/' 

No sharp line can be drawn between man and the brute 
which shall leave the dawn of religious conception on one 
side and the absence of sucn on the other. The ancestors 
of the great European civilizations were savages as degrad- 
ed as those here introduced. In the Egyptian representa- 
tives described by Cbampollion, the victorious Sesostris 
leads captive representatives of Europe, Asia, and Africa. 
The European is sketched as a savage clad in the skins of 
wild beasts, but the Syrian is attired in splendid Asiatic 
costume. 

Europe has her own monuments to indicate the status of 
her ancient people. 

The shell-heaps of the North, the arrow-heads and other 
imperishable remains found buried beneath the earth, are 



30 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

vestiges of peoples rude as the Red Indian of British Colum- 
bia. The inhabitants of Britain two thousand years ago 
met the invasion of Caesar with arrows and spears of wood 
hardened in the fire. Their clothing was of skins of wild 
beasts, and their dwellings caves excavated beneath the 
earth. It is well determined that these savages, shouting 
their harsh war-cries as they gallantly met in unequal com- 
bat the invincible legions of Rome, have absorbed their 
conquerors, and that the present English people are -their 
direct descendants. 

This progress has involved an equal advance in religious 
conceptions. Every increment of knowledge threw new 
light on the nature and influence of the gods, and revealed 
more correctly the relations of man to his fellows. There is 
not a vestige of moral sense until the intellect is capable 
of comprehension. 

Religion is the observance of certain ceremonies. "Why 
are these observed? Because they are supposed to have 
been dictated by the gods, and especially pleasing to them. 
They propitiate their wrath and win their favor. Wholly 
selfish are they, springing from fear of the gods. The gods 
are never angry; and, although man for immemorial ages 
has sought their favor by prostration and sacrifice, in no 
instance have they interfered with the established order of 
things. 

The religious element is fear^ by which the imagination 
is perverted and reason enslaved. This is its ultimate anal- 
ysis. 

It is said, we are conscious of this element within us— 
that, by the failure of our schemes, the blasting of our 
hopes, the mystery which gathers round our lives, the limi- 
tation of our understanding, the unfathomableness of caus- 
ation, we are prone to bow in submission, and acknowledge 
a superior Power governing Nature. 

But we find, as knowledge of the laws of causation 
becomes more accurate, we are enabled to account for the 



RELIGION, ITS ULTIMATE ANALYSIS. 31 > \ 

blasting of our hopes, the failure of our plans, the mystery 
of our lives — are less impressed and overwhelmed with a 
sense of the unknown, and feel less of that dependence 
which some acute metaphysicians claim to be the ultimate 
of religious feeling. Here the distinction is drawn between 
morality and religion. The observance of the prescribed 
ceremonials of his time has constituted the religious man, 
and no amount of good works could shield him from the 
charge of infidelity if he neglected such observances. 
Moral ideas are not naturally allied to religious, and flow 
from a different source. To primitive man the observance 
of superstitious customs is far more essential than moral 
conduct. Cherishing the coarsest vices, he will suffer death 
before he will disobey the requirements of superstition. 



CHAPTER III. 

HISTORICAL REVIEW -FETISHISM. 

If any man love acorns since corn is invented, let him eat 
acorns; but it is very unreasonable that he should forbid 
others the use of wheat. 

Savage man is depressed and overpowered by the object- 
ive world. He is the sport and buffet of the elements. 
The invisible wind, bearing on its wings clouds and tem- 
pest, through whose chambers the lightnings are flung and 
thunders bay; the ever-moving waters of river and sea; the 
sunshine flooding the earth— are grand and inexplicable 
mysteries to his feeble mind. He endows all objects with 
life ; fires arrows to intimidate the lightning ; undertakes 
hostile expeditious against offending winds; or shouts his 
battle-cry to frighten the monster devouring the eclipsed 
moon. Every moving thing has life and intelligence like 
his own. The animal world forms one great family, of 
which he is the elder brother. They understand each other 
and him. Like a child he converses with them. u Do not 
cry like a woman, but bear death like a brave," says the 
Indian to the wounded bear. "He keeps silent for fear of 
slavery," says the Negro of the baboon. His ardent imagi- 
nation, unrestrained by reason, exalts the instincts of his 
brother animals. He is not far removed from them, and, 
astonished at their sagacity and the mystery of their 
instinctive actions, believes them his superiors. 

He worships, because he fears, everything — rocks, trees, 
streams, mountains, sun, and stars. These are worshiped 
direct, and not as types or symbols of inferior deities, as is 

32 



tJNIYERSALITY OF FETISHISM. 33 

often claimed, for the mind at this stage is not capable of 
any conception beyond the sphere of the senses. The 
object was worshiped as a god, not God behind a veil. 
Each individual, according to his caprice, selected an 
object of worship ; at first only for* a time, but afterwards 
for a longer period, even during life. Objects exciting 
fear, terror, or emotions of pleasure, were first selected. 
The savage is ruled by the passions. He cannot be said to 
reason. He is controlled by his emotions. He worships 
that which he most fears, or from which he expects the 
greatest assistance. His motive is fear. The dark is a 
monster — every obscure cavern, the jaws of destruction. 
Terrified by the life he cannot comprehend, he personifies 
that life ; and coming to a belief that personalities stand 
behind visible effects, a sense of his own helplessness inten- 
sifies his fear. He believes these personalities interfere in 
the affairs of men, and may be influenced by prayers and 
incantations. He devoutly believes in witchcraft and sor- 
cery. In this early theology, morality has no part. The 
gods do not interfere for the purpose of rewarding man's 
moral or punishing his immoral acts, for he has not arrived 
at the understanding of moral relations. 

His dim consciousness of a future state is fraught with 
terror. Death, the surrender of existence to the elemental 
forces, is a frightful phenomenon to primitive man. The 
spirit then leaves the body, to wander an unseen shade, 
capable of assuming any shape, and inflicting torments on 
the living. Its name must not be pronounced, for fear of 
recalling it. The world of spirits is terrible from its invisi- 
bility; and the savage, fearless in battle with overwhelming 
foes, feels utterly powerless and prostrates himself before 
the mysterious and irresponsible beings of the air. 

To enter this invisible world and subject its shades to 
mortal will — to approach the gods in their secret chambers, 
and engage them in the furtherance of mortal plans— has 
been from earliest times the daring scheme of theology. 



34 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

This is its basis, from which the most enlightened notions 
of antiquity did not arise. It is encouraged by Catholicism 
in holy relics, the cross, rosaries, and amulets; and by the 
Protestant in holy days and books. The metaphysical phi- 
losophers, when they assign a soul to Nature, and lose 
themselves in a bewildering Pantheism, return to Fetish- 
ism. 

Here is the cradle of theology. It exists in its intensest 
form. The savage, by deifying all objects, dwells con- 
stantly in the presence of his gods. He cannot escape from 
them. He illustrates a state theologians never weary of 
applauding, wherein reason creates no doubt, nor examines 
with too curious eye the vague theories of cosmology. All 
ideas are theological. Every act of man's life has direct 
reference to his theological belief. There is no necessity 
for mediators between him and them, and priests are not 
serviceable. He appeals directly to his gods. There is no 
religious system, as each individual creates his own. All is 
indeterminate, vague, and unreal. When everything is 
regarded as subject to the caprice of controlling intelli- 
gences, there can be no conception of universal law or fix- 
ity of action. The spirit of investigation is dormant, or 
overwhelmed by the religious emotions. It is for this rea- 
son the Fetish state is one of intellectual stagnation, and 
progress out of it is extremely slow. The mind is so pre- 
occupied with its childish* vagaries as to preclude correct 
observation. When Nature becomes thus idealized, there 
is no room for human effort. The gods rule arbitrarily, 
and nothing is left for man but to appease their anger 
or flatter their vanity by abject homage. Such con- 
ceptions cannot exert an elevating influence. They 
rather impede progress, and suffocate thought by supersti- 
tion — the childish fear of evil beings. Man travels a long 
and weary road, one directly diverging from religion, before 
he gains the mastery of nature, and through moral sensibili- 
ties recognizes a benevolent being as Creator. This early 



FETISHISM THE CRADLE OF THEOLOGY. 3o 

condition lias not yet been wholly outgrown, and too often 
is the spectacle presented of men of scientific acumen prej- 
udiced by religious dogmatism. 

To understand the feelings and ideas of savages, we must 
place ourselves in their position. Standing on the high 
ground of the present, we find it difficult to appreciate their 
sensations; but if we imbibe the true Fetish spirit, we shall 
be astonished that infant man, placed in a strange world, 
which appeared to him like a gigantic phantasmagoria, was 
not led into greater errors by his theories, founded as they 
were on illusions instead of correct observation. It is 
usual for theologians to regard the systems of Paganism as 
impostures, and their priests as jugglers; but no fact is 
more patent than that all these systems are legitimate out- 
growths of the mind, and these jugglers are the parents of 
the present race of theologians. The Puritans were 
shocked at the pow-wows of the Indians, referring them to 
the Devil; but the Indians were undoubtedly as sincere as 
the rigid Puritans. Theological ideas are born of the 
necessities of their time. Artifice and dissimulation may 
answer immediate ends, but they can never be received by 
whole races of men. Those whom it is customary to 
regard as impostors were thoroughly convinced them- 
selves, and found responsiveness in those they led. The 
dreadful extravagances into which they fell are sufficient 
proof of their own entire sincerity. 

The worship of plants and animals may have served a 
beneficial purpose before their usefuness could be learned. 
The savage is intent on destruction alone, and without 
some check might destroy himself by thoughtlessly exter- 
minating the animals which supplied him with food. Each 
selects an object for his own individual worship — a tree, an 
animal, a rock, a stream— and addresses his prayers direct. 
Any uncommon occurrence — as an earthquake, tornado, or 
falling meteor— attracts general attention, and from many 
elicits homage. A black stone became the shrine of, or 



36 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

rather at first was, Cybele. Rough blocks of stone, from 
some singularity of form, were worshiped by the ancient 
people of Greece. The glory of the rising sun — the activ- 
ity of life evoked by its presence — the calm repose of his 
going down, are among the most surprising events of 
Nature. The splendor of the starry hosts of night, if not 
as startling, is full of awful mystery. The sun, as source of 
life, is chief among the gods, and the stars are living souls. 
When blind adoration advanced to star-worship, the bor- 
ders of Polytheism were reached. The Fetish of the indi- 
vidual became that of his family; when the family en- 
larged to a tribe, it became that of the tribe; and as it still 
enlarged by growth or conquest, it became the chief of the 
nation's gods. During this growth the conception of the 
Fetish changed. The object was no longer worshiped, but 
a spirit behind the object. A generalization was made by 
the worshiper. It was no longer an individual tree he 
adored, but the Spirit of all the trees; not the brook, or sea, 
but the Spirit of all the waters; not the different winds, 
but the god of the wind. 

A part of Fetishism was the Phallic worship which lies at 
the foundation of all religions, and is among the oldest 
faiths. The mysterious process of creation, typified by the 
male and female organs of generation, the phallus and yoni, 
early attracted the attention of savage man. He worshiped 
the symbols of those organs, called his gods by their names, 
and invented rites and appropriate ceremonies. The bull, 
the horse, the ram were taken for symbols, and the sun, 
source of all creation, was worshiped as the chief god. 

The unity of god grew out of the worship of the yoni, 
while the trinity developed from the devotion to the triple 
character of the male organs, or phallus. Hindostan fur- 
nishes an illustration of this early faith, and the ideas con- 
nected therewith. The phallus became the cross, emblem 
of eternal life, spiritualized from the type of material crea- 
tion. 



CHRISTIANITY IS FULL OF FETISHISM. 37 

With this enlargement of their spheres, the character of 
the beings worshiped changes, becomes spiritualized, yet 
transcendentally human. The Anthropomorphism is not 
lost for a moment ; it is constantly magnified. The gods are 
removed from man by the intervention of physical objects 
—by whole provinces of physical objects. They become 
active forces. The necessity of a mediator to interpret 
their will becomes felt, and priests are introduced. The 
medicine-man of the Indian, the juggler of the African, are 
illustrations of the early priesthood. They, by observing 
certain customs, more or less absurd, come in nearer con- 
tact with their deities. They can avert evil, bring rain, 
make the chase or war-path successful, assist their friends, 
or overwhelm their enemies. 

At first they have little power, but they soon come to be 
feared as much as the gods whom they interpret. As love 
of power is a dominant motive with man — and especially 
on this low plane, they were not tardy in grasping any 
means and putting forth their strength. They surrounded 
their gods with mystery, invented ceremonies, sacrifices, 
and forms innumerable, by which the gods were removed 
beyond contact with common people, and their own office 
rendered more necessary. By keeping the people in pro- 
found ignorance they made them willing dupes, and from 
age to age strengthened the power of theology. It became 
tyrannical, usurped political as well as spiritual dictator- 
ship, and at times rested on the prostrate nations like a hor- 
rid vampire, paralyzing their strength and crushing every 
effort of advancement. 

Fetishism with our own race is of the remote past, yet its 
stain is indellibly fixed on our religious system. Christian- 
ity is full of it. Claiming, as it does, divine completeness 
and the worship of the one true God, there would be little 
left of it were its Fetishism stripped away. When pesti- 
lence smites our cities, the earthquake prostrates their 
proud towers in ruins, or storms devastate, prayers 



88 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

and sermons are sent forth from every Christian pulpit 
asking God to deal lightly, or charging these natural events 
to warning PrQvidence. In seasons of drought, fasts are 
still held to invoke rain, in exactly the same spirit in whieh 
the Indian medicine-men shake their calabashes and call on 
the Great Spirit. Churches are peculiarly. holy places, Sun- 
day a holy day, and fasts, penance, and the sacrifice of 
worldly considerations peculiarly acceptable to God. The 
outbursts of the elements, in the Christian view, are acts of 
Providence. Recently the Californian earthquake-called 
out an expression from clergy and laymen honorable to 
Fetish worshipers. Instead of seeing the activity of vol- 
canic forces in the subterranean axis on which that country 
is placed, they saw only the warnings of an angry God. It 
would be difficult to say why California needs such warn- 
ing more than New York, where the revenue of the most 
aristocratic church is derived from the rent of its estate 
occupied as drinking saloons, gambling hells, and houses 
of prostitution — whose sleek, high-salaried minister is liter- 
ally clothed by the activity of the purple fingers of starva- 
tion, and fed by the sale of human souls. 

The annual Thanksgiving ordered by the American Gov- 
ernment, and reechoed by the States, is a relic of Fetishism, 
and, as such, is degrading in its tendencies. It is a hopeful 
sign that year by year the "Proclamation" is becoming little 
more than a form, and we may hope, at no distant day, a 
chief magistrate may be elected having sufficient manhood 
to ignore this absurd and outgrown custom. 

The lingering faith in miracles is a remnant of the belief 
that the gods manage everything. Miracles are at the foun- 
dation of all systems of religion; and it is maintained by 
leading theologians that the- human mind is so constituted 
that it cannot believe religion of divine origin unless 
accompanied with miracles. Catholicism retains the mira- 
cle-working power, which its priests continue to practice, 
and the erudite Protestant divine stands up in his pulpit, a 



THE JEWS WERE FETISH WORSHIPERS. 39 

competitor with, the African rain-maker. This belief is 
like some molluscs, found fossil in the rocks of all past 
ages, and with charmed lives flourishing in the seas of the 
present: it grasps the animal and emotional faculties, and, 
as long as they are in ascendancy, will not yield its tena- 
cious life. 

Polytheism constantly presents its Fetish origin. The 
family or tribe Fetish became the Panates of the Romans 
and the bull Apis of the Egyptians, the national Fetish, 
the Olympian Jove of Greece — the Capitoline Jupiter of 
Rome — the Caaba of Arabia. 

It would be presumed that the Jews from the earliest 
period, carefully instructed by the only true God, would n^ 

not show the least crace of religious progress, for their sys- A 

tern was not of growth but revelation. Contrary to this "^ 

inference—and infallibly indicating its human origin — they 
present all phases of growth, and, at the period of their /~~ 

greatest splendor, Fetishism and Polytheism blended with 
their vaunted Monotheism. The Seraphim of Laban was a r 

family Fetish; the horses consecrated to the Sun in the 
Temple of Solomon (2 Kings xxiii, 2) were of the tribe, and 
the Cherubim aod Most Holy Place were national Fetishes. 
The God of Abraham was a coarse Fetish. The Jews 
never escaped the influence of grossest idolatry. They be- 
lieved that their Jehovah dwelt especially in the Holy 
Place of their Temple, and propitiated him by sacrifices, 
rites, and ceremonies innumerable. He is a mean, cruel, 
unjust, vindictive, blood-thirsty despot, to whom the purely 
human and lovable Jove of Greece must not be compared. 
The Jews reflected their own stern, grim, and revengeful 
natures in their God, and their religion nowhere indicates a 
superhuman origin. 

Fetishism is emphatically a religion of fear, because it 
reflects most clearly the origin of what are called the relig- 
ious feelings. It asserts the anger of the gods, and its 
priests are tireless in their efforts to invent methods by 



40 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

which they can be appeased. They run wild with a terri- 
ble hallucination. The more unnatural an action, the more 
pleasing to the gods. Mutilation — as cutting off a finger, 
knocking out a tooth, flagellation, sacrifices — often human 
— are required of the servile devotee. Knowledge is 
repressed. All ideas of fixed order or law are lost in crea- 
tion resolved into a succession of miracles. As these are 
not always in accordance with the welfare of man, appro- 
priate gods are assigned to each. Classes of gods are 
formed — one good, the other evil. Man becomes a buffet 
between the two. Sacrifice gains the favor of the first, and 
appeases the anger of the last. There is God-worship and 
Devil-worship— as illustrated in the Christian Church, 
which assigns in its theology the second place to the God 
of Evil. 

The later phase of Fetishism — where every individual has 
his own particular object of worship — so far from exerting 
a moral influence, acts in the opposite direction. It loosens 
the moral bonds, if any exist, and the possession of the 
especial favors of a god makes its recipient selfish and Over. 
bearing. If the Fetish united the members of (>e tribe in 
closer union, it intensified their hostility to other tribes. 
The national Fetish would become jealous of those of 
others, and all wars would become religious crusades — 
the national Fetishes commanding and guiding their fol- 
lowers. The jealousy of the Fetishes or gods, arrays tribe 
against tribe — nation against nation. The words '* foreign- 
er " and f * enemy " become synonymous. War becomes the 
normal state of mankind, and the slaughter of nations 
acceptable sacrifice to the gods, who love the steaming 
blood of their enemies. This instinct of destruction at 
times becomes so energetic that the life of the worshiper 
is jeopardized, the necessities of the sacrificial altar obligat- 
ing incessant war to secure captives to appease the anger of 
the terrible gods. The Aztecs carried this slaughter to 
such excess that often in default of captives they drafted 



MORAL INFLUENCE OF FETISHISM. 4} 

from their own ranks, and from this cause the nation was 
rapidly declining. The Jews furnish an appalling example 
of a people blindly obeying the commands of their Fetish 
as interpreted by their priests. Jehovah is a god. of battles 
— commands the extermination of whole nations; the 
butchery of men, women, and children; the prostitution of 
the charms of woman ; and countless unmentionable hor- 
rors. When the battle thickens, he guides the shafts of 
death, and even consents to stay the course of the sun to 
allow his butchers to accomplish their demoniac task. 
Only among the cannibals of the South Sea is there a par- 
allel example. The sacred historian has recorded the 
slaughter of the Midianites, the dispossession of the com- 
paratively refined and opulent Canaanites, with a heartless- 
ness equaled only by the flendishness of the commands of 
Jehovah. 

The political influence of such a religion is to encourage a 
narrow, intense patriotism, and exclusive national isolation. 
It institutes two codes — one for the stranger, the other 
for citizens — a distinction retained by the Jews. 

Fetishism evolves Polytheism by insensible degrees, and 
the two are inextricably blended. The worship of the 
object is transferred to the spirit, but to the very latest the 
image is preserved, and the Polytheist bestows quite as 
much adoration on the one as on the other. 



CHAPTER IV. 

HISTORICAL REVIEW-POLYTHEISM. 

Who does not see that the abyss becomes every day deeper 
under the belief of the past, and that science at a given moment 
will become the foundation of more perfect morality?— 
Pouchet. 

The primary claim of theology is that man could not 
have attained a true religion without a revelation. Plunged 
in idolatry, he could not have extricated himself, but would 
have sunk deeper and deeper without such divine guid- 
ance. The Old Testament accomplished little for the Jew, 
and the ISTew produced no sudden effect. There was steady 
but slow growth from Fetishism to Anthropomorphism, 
and the transition from Paganism fro Christianity was an 
almost imperceptible change. Such must be; for the gods 
being projections of the minds of their worshipers, change 
with their mental growth. The reception of a superior god 
presupposes superiority in the recipient. Metaphysical 
speculation on the character and origin of the gods of Poly- 
theism belong to an age long subsequent to their active 
worship. The devotees have no attenuated theories of 
godly existence, else they would be philosophers, and not 
devotees. All the fine theories by which writers have 
sought to involve ancient mythology in allegory and fable 
only show how little their authors entered into and compre- 
hended ancient life. Apollo was not the sun to his wor- 
shipers, but a godlike man. Zeus was not the sky, but a 
man who ruled the sky. There was no allegory, no mystic 
meaning, to the early worshipers. A deity stands behind 

42 



ORIGIN OF POLYTHEISM. 43 

the object and receives homage. As the intellect com- 
menced its grand self -analysis, purely intellectual concep- 
tions began to be deified. The confusion which has arisen 
in the study of mythology is the result of its reception as a 
whole, and not as a production of successive advances. It 
-would be as accurate to speak of the fossils of geology as a 
whole, without distinguishing the ages to which they be- 
long. 

The gods are the active energies of the world, while mat- 
ter is inert and passive to their will, a doctrine which has 
been almost universally held until the present concep- 
tion of " force " as the energizing power inherent in matter 
As the human mind cannot conceive of the existence of a 
higher type than itself, the gods must be human in all their 
qualities. Even the Olympian Jove was human in passions, 
emotions, and desires. The gods are born and nourished, 
are married and become parents, but are immortal and never 
grow old. They gather around the festive board in Olym- 
pus, quaff nectar, and partake of celestial food. The 
Polytheist dwelt in a charmed world. Every object 
breathed poetry. He was an especial ward of the gods* 
some of whom, go where he would, he was sure to meet. 
Pluto, Neptune, and Jove divided between them the do- 
mains of the nether world— the ocean, the land, and sky. 
The sun and moon had their deities. Ceres brings the har- 
vest; the Muses inspire the golden tongue of Poesy; Mars 
drives the chariot of war. Every act of life or occupation 
has especial deities ; every nation has its chief god: Zeus, 
Athena, Juno, Baal, Osiris, Jehovah, Odin — partial to their 
particular people, and more powerful than the gods of oth- 
ers. These chief gods, possessing human propensities, can 
be tempted at times to transfer their power to other nations. 
Jacob made a bargain with Elohim, and the Romans prayed 
the gods of other nations to join their conquering standard. 
When nations fought, it was rather to test the strength of 
their respective gods rather than their own. When the con- 



44: CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

querors forced their religion on the conquererd, it was 
rejected until it was determined whether the defeated gods 
were only temporarily banished to caves or mountains, or 
overthrown. The Romans adopted the conquered gods into 
their Pantheon, but the Aztecs shut them up in a temple 
for that purpose. 

The apotheosis of great and good men intensified the 
anthropomorphic conceptions of the gods. Men who serve 
their nations in important and critical missions— overthrow- 
ing their enemies, or introducing ameliorating improve- 
ments — receive the worship of their grateful countrymen, 
and are enshrined with the gods. As the Semite was over- 
awed by the dim sense of an overruling power received 
from the sameness of the deserts inhabited by that race, the 
early Greeks or Pelasgians were impressed in a manner 
exactly opposite by the diversity Nature presented. Of 
quick sense and fancy, deeply sympathizing with the exter- 
nal world, they, out of the exuberance of their own life, 
imparted that principle to every object. Nothing was inert 
or lifeless. The teeming earth, the rushing winds, the wild 
clouds, the grand mountains, the glorious sun, the moon 
and stars — all by their motions manifested life. They felt 
not so much awe, as affection and kinship with Nature. 
Savages they were, but savages with fine fancy. They gave 
names to the elements, and at first had no conception of an 
individuality separate from them. Then, in process of 
growth, the moving power was referred to intelligence, but 
that intelligence preserved the former name. Zeus, or Deus — 
the upper air, or the sky, when personified and made a god, 
retained the name of the celestial regions. He it was who 
dwelt on the summits of mountains and drew clouds around 
him as a mantle. As the Supreme Deity, the gods of infe- 
rior position gathered in a great family around him, quaff- 
ing ambrosia and feasting at his table. His nod is the un- 
changeable decree of Fate, and his eternal serenity can by 
no means be disturbed. The fixed order and succession of 



MONOTHEISM AND PKIESTCRAFT. 45 

events are his, and from him all power is primarily derived. 
The Greeks were worshipers of Nature. Their deities were 
human — immortal — but requiring food, and the savor of 
sacrifice was agreeable to them. They loved, hated, were 
jealous and capricious, and often involved Jove himself in 
their quarrels. 

As soon as the gods became anthropomorphic, they inter- 
ested themselves in the affairs of men. Their aid could be 
procured by prayer, but not with certainty. The most 
exalted hero might innocently provoke their implacable 
anger. They were offended when mortals forgot, in the 
intoxication of success, their own weakness, and claimed 
equality with themselves. But uninterrupted success, even 
meekly borne, was odious " I know the invidiousness of 
fortune; your extraordinary prosperity excites my appre- 
hensions/' said Amasis, King of Egypt, to Polycrates, 
whose friendship he therefore renounced. Minor afflictions 
were courted by the prosperous as satisfying the gods, and 
thus averting greater calamities. The deities were always 
pleased with rites and ceremonies performed for their own 
especial benefit, and these were so important that even their 
involuntary omission received terrible retribution. Natural 
law and the fixed order of events have no place in this sys- 
tem: the gods act arbitrarily. Theology explains every- 
thing after the manner of the Mohammedan, who says 
earthquakes are due to the cow throwing the world from 
one horn to the other; or the Muycas, who say the world- 
supporting god wearies, and changes his burden from one 
shoulder to the other. In the progressive growth of ideas, 
a unitizing power is found in a chief god, who reflects the 
highest ideal of the worshiper. The chief god is absolute 
and perfect, yet his omnipotence and perfection are limited 
by finite conceptions. Zeus has his weakness, and Jehovah 
is a narrow despot. The way is slowly prepared for Mono- 
theism by the dependency of the lesser gods on one all-pow- 
erful chief. The amenability of even this god to law— the 



46 CAREER OP RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

shadowing forth of what is now absolute Science — is ex- 
pressed in a sentence of Herodotus : " It is impossible even 
for God to escape Fate." This state of ignorance and child- 
ishness was the paradise of the priesthood; for Catholicism 
truly says: ' 'Ignorance is the mother of devotion." The med- 
icine-man advanced with swift strides to supremacy in the 
State ; he unscrupulously grasped power in any and every 
form and exerted it in a remorseless manner. The intellect- 
ual activity of Greece escaped in the exuberance of its youth- 
ful vigor the servile obedience to the priestly caste, but on 
other nations it has been the veritable Old Man of the Sea, 
clutching and holding fast. Their history is written in 
blood — a history of the most atrocious crimes and terrible 
misery the world can ever produce. No outrage on Nature, 
no corruption of the human mind, has been sufficiently 
appalling to satisfy the demands of priestly theology. 

By pretending to the occult knowledge of astrology and 
divination, they seemed to the credulous masses to hold the 
keys of fate in their hands. They monopolized learning, 
and the most superficial knowledge of physical science was 
of invaluable service to them in an age of ignorant credu. 
lity. Accurate observations of the weather, enabling its 
changes to be predicted, the adroit management of poisons 
in an age when their symptoms were not understood, have 
made the reputation of many a prophet. The priesthood 
has generally surrounded itself with the awful mysteries of 
self-sacrifice, renouncing the world, dwelling in cells in 
their temples little better than dungeons, observing series 
of fasts, vigils, penance, ablutions, flagellations, and tor- 
tures, often becoming more fanatical than those they led. 

Being the only learned class they have always sought — 
and generally with success — to seize all the means of educa- 
tion. Understanding the plasticity of the young mind and 
the ineradicability of ideas once firmly fixed, they have 
craftily moulded the minds of youth to their wills, and 
secured from the matured man abject and unquestioning 



INFLUENCE OF PRIESTCRAT ON PROGRESS. 47 

reverence for their religion. They have, on the other hand, 
served a purpose for good. They have nourished the arts 
and sciences so far as comported with their advantage; they 
were for continuous ages the only educated class. Levying 
tithes in the names of their gods, the priesthood becomes 
free from want, and their whole attention directed to study 
and contemplation. They wield their subtle influence over 
the ruling classes, and form the power behind the throne. 
The will of the gods, expressed through the priestly oracle, 
is of greater potency than the united voices of the people. 
Their "Thus saith the Lord" becomes the watchword of 
unspeakable crimes and tyranny. They have been regarded 
as necessary to the progress of the race most falsely, for the 
race has advanced in antagonism to its spiritual rulers; 
they have been a dead lock on the wheels. Whenever and 
wherever they have been in the ascendancy, the nation thus 
controlled has sunk in decay, and, prematurely old, become 
the vassal of stronger powers. Egypt furnishes an. extreme 
example, attaining great perfection in that knowledge 
encouraged by the priesthood, but becoming stagnant and 
effete. Hindoostan is another, showing the lethargy in- 
duced by theocratic rule. Rome was not repressed by its 
influence; and Greece, freest of ail ancient nations, attained 
the highest civilization. The priesthood is necessary, as it 
is necessary for early man to be a cannibal ; but it cannot 
from this be argued that the latter is necessary to progress. 
Cannibalism in some instances has almost destroyed savage 
peoples, and, pressed into the service of the gods, it has 
produced— as in Mexico— deplorable results, blasting the 
nascent civilization there springing up. While those 
nations over which the priesthood has wielded the most 
undisputed power have fallen into the lethargy of death, in 
exact ratio as others have escaped such influence has been 
the nobility of their civilization. Greece, most emancipated 
from theocratic rule, shines like a star amidst the darkness 
of ancient night. Her band of freethinkers bore aloft the 



48 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

regis of intellectual life and handed it down to the present 
through the flood of Roman conquest and theocratic barbar- 
ism of the Middle Ages. In her free atmosphere, where 
the ceremonials of worship were celebrated by the father 
for his household, or the prince for his people, a class of 
men arose— the philosophers— impossible in a nation gov- 
erned by a theocracy, who, free from all authority, pursued 
the studies of art, literature, and science, and blessed all 
succeeding ages of the world. 

The morality of Polytheism was greatly superior to that 
of Fetishism. It shows either gross ignorance or wilful 
misstatement to pronounce the ancients, prior to the advent 
of Christianity, wanting in morality. The lives of some of 
their great men are comparable with any of those of mod- 
ern times. The philosophers of Greece and Rome taught 
that sin was a disease, and virtue health of the spirit — that 
perfection should be the aim, and all should endeavor to 
live divine lives. Never have the duties of man been more 
clearly set forth. The theocracy separated religion from 
morality, and the observance of the routine of sacrifices 
and ceremonies came to stand for a well-ordered life, just 
as it does under the Monotheistic system of the present. It 
has been truly said thai Rome, conscious of her strength 
and destiny, worshiped herself. The larger part of her fes- 
tive days were commemorative of great events in her 
annals, rather than devoted to special duties. The eagles 
of her conquering legions were sacred, and the altar was 
placed in the centre of the camp as the Ark of God was in 
that of the Israelites. Rome deified and erected temples to 
her virtues. Concord, Faith, Constancy, Modesty, Hope, 
and Peace had their respective votive shrines. The deifi- 
cation of these virtues indicates the noble aspirations of 
their devotees, and the constant presence of their gods 
must have produced a salutary effect. 

The gods, though dwelling on high Olympus, possessed 
domains on the earth, held in the same regard as those of 



RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE OF POLYTHEISM. 49 

the king, distinguished by an altar protected by a sacred 
grove. Temples were erected on these holy grounds, which 
were often cultivated for the maintenance of the ceremo- 
nies prescribed by their possessors and of the priests. 
Every trade had its presiding deity, as it now has its patron 
saint. There was a god to protect the traveler, the sage, 
and the warrior. The influence of a firm belief in such 
divine presence, cannot in this age be appreciated. That it 
was implicitly believed, and even to a late day, there can 
be no doubt. In the age of the Antonines the Attic hus- 
bandman believed in the power of the hero of Marathon, and 
the Arcadians could hear the pipings of Pan. The belief of 
the common people was a religious faith. National mis- 
fortunes, by making them cling with greater affection to 
the past, strengthened the influence of the old faith. 

The religion of the ancients was not deficient in elements 
of fear. It was not an easy system, presenting no punish- 
ment for sin, but gave positive assurance that no wrongful 
thought or action could escape its consequences. The mec- 
sengers of the gods, the Furies, by the terror they awakened, 
placed on the actions of mortals the restraint of fear. Ho- 
mer wraps them in dreadful obscurity, places their dwell- 
ing in the awful depths of the invisible world, and makes 
them horrible to the gods whose mandates they execute. 
Shrouded in darkness, they go forth on their errands, and 
by no means can they be propitiated. Stern, inevitable 
retribution for crime was theirs. Sooner or later, with soft 
but swift steps, they overtook the guilty, and no prayer or 
sacrifice could loosen their remorseless hands. Absolute 
acd eternal justice was their goal. 

Not beliefs but actions reveal the moral status of a people 
Man's ideas of God have very little influence on his practi- 
cal morality. A Catholic, a Deist, or an Atheist may enter- 
tain equally elevated moral views. The idea of God is rather 
an effect than a cause. The great sects—Brahmins, Buddh- 
ists, Moslems, and Christians— entertain conceptions of God 



50 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

and have a standard of morality evolved from the circum- 
stances peculiar to each, and the worshiper at one shrine is 
as often an upright, honest man as at another. The better 
the individual, the higher and purer his moral conceptions 
and intellectual aspirations, the more exalted and refined his 
ideal personification. If the negation of Atheism is reached, 
the manly boldness which denies the received dogmas of 
the time is a guarantee of an upright mind. Atheists are 
notable for uprightness of character. The idea of God pre- 
sented by others may have its effect on those who receive 
it, but not on its originators. 

Polytheism, in its highest form, led to a cheerful accept- 
ance of the good and ill of life, and enjoyment of present 
blessings. Eeligion was joyous, and rarely made unrea- 
sonable demands on its receivers. The Sacred Mysteries 
absorbed religious fervor, and through symbol' c ceremonies 
became a strong tie, binding its votaries together, and a 
teacher of all the noble virtues and manly living. They 
were the embodied conceptions of sages and poets, of the 
future life, the characters of the gods, and the soul's transi 
tion to them. The secrets of the greater mysteries were so 
carefully preserved that little is known of the grand philos- 
ophy of life they sought symbolically to impress on the 
trembling initiate, but enough is known to show how deeply 
early Christianity imbibed its forms and philosophy. 

The popular belief in immortality among the Greeks 
differed little from that of the early Christians. Names 
changed, but the ideas remained the same. The spirit at 
death at once entered Hades, but it enjoyed no rest until its 
funeral rites were properly performed. It was as important 
that the body of the slain hero be recovered as that'the bat- 
tle be won, and the most desperate contests occurred over 
the fallen. In the Under-world they pursue occupations 
the same as on earth, only like phantoms. They have no 
strength ; this they receive by means of the blood of victims 
sacrificed by living friends ; then they regain memory and 



SACRIFICES AND WORSHIP OF POLYTHEISM. 51 

affection for a time, and recognize and feel for those they 
have left on earth. The vast multitude in Hades are in a 
stupified, half-conscious state. While the shades of heroes 
and sages were transported to an island in the ocean, ex- 
empt from all the vicissitudes of the seasons, and perpet- 
ually fanned by cool and fragrant western breezes, the 
enemies of the gods were removed to the abyss of Tartarus, 
as far beneath Hades as that was beneath the earth. Its 
iron door shut them from the mercy of the offended gods ; 
its brazen floor was pressed by the footsteps of never-end- 
ing toil ; and its vaulted arches echoed the groans of never- 
satisfied longings. This poetical conception was after- 
wards refashioned into the loathsome Purgatory of Cathol- 
icism. 

Sacrifices often were enacted poems, visible expressions 
of gratitude to the unknown and incomprehensible forces 
of Nature. Out. of awe grew a sense of dependence, and 
the performance of a given labor was as nothing without 
the approval of the gods. Libations were made at the 
social meal ; the harvest gave its offerings ; the youth and 
maiden gave votive locks to certain deities. Simple rites 
were these, but satisfying. The earliest sacrifice was made 
to appease the anger or court the favor of the invisible pow- 
ers, and when the anthropomorphic ideas strengthened, the 
earthly ruler became the image of the gods, and what to 
him was pleasing was regarded so to them. They were 
envious, and must be appeased by costly presents and rich 
banquets. The costliness of these was in proportion to the 
supposed displeasure of the gods. This belief carried to 
extreme would require the life of man as the greatest sacri- 
fice. The immolation of the twelve Trojans by the Greeks 
on the funeral pyle of Patrocles to sooth his departed sou'., 
of two Greek and two Gallic captives by the Romans when 
the gods through Hannibal threatened the life of their city, 
the fate of Jephthah's daughter, and the command to 
Abraham to offer up his son, and the sacrifice every fifth or 



52 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

seventh month by many ancient peoples of a victim chosen 
by lot, indicates the universality of this belief. 

Polytheism is accused of worshiping images for gods, but 
no one acquainted with its genius can for a moment enter- 
tain the idea that the humble worshiper regarded the image 
as anything more than a bond between himself and the 
deity it represented. He had outgrown this early belief, 
yet his mind, unable to grasp the conception of the gods, 
employed images as assistants. Some nations discarded ar- 
tificial images, and with keen intellectual perception paid 
direct homage to the life-giving sun and the starry hosts. 
The Jews discarded images, but, by concealing their deity 
behind the veil of the Temple and creating an awful mys- 
tery, before the veil of which they knelt, were as real idola- 
ters as the surrounding peoples. 

Polytheism taught a narrow patriotism founded on the 
partial and exclusive character of its national gods, com- 
prised in the love of country and hatred of foreigners. This 
exclusiveness was subdued by the conquests of Alexander 
and policy of Rome, whereby nations were brought into 
direct contact and amalgamated. The comparison of the 
gods assembled in the Pantheon prepared the way for the 
reception of Monotheism. The multitudes of gods were 
amenable to the control of the One God. This was not a 
new theory, but rather the sweeping away of old poetic gar- 
niture of subsidiary deities. When the apostle spoke of the 
Unknown God, he was readily understood by the Athe- 
nians. Monotheism was a direct growth of Polytheism, 
but various deflections were made on the way as various 
obstacles to growth were interposed. Of these, Dualism 
and Pantheism are the most important. The belief in a 
supremely good and a supremely evil being antedates the 
birth of Zoroaster. Involving a contradiction, it has been 
one of the most annoying and perplexing problems, over 
which to this day the Christian world wrangles. Two infi- 
nite and supreme lyings cannot exist ; hence it was taught 



DUALISM AND PANTHEISM. 5$ 

that the evil god, once good, had fallen from his high estate. 
But an infinite being cannot change. The evil god must be 
less in power than the good god, and if the latter is all-pow- 
erful and good he could not allow the evil one to exist. 
The Persians solved this problem by referring both as ema- 
nations from one source, which Supreme Fountain became 
identical with the One, and Dualism ran its course. This 
belief, through the Eastern disciples, entered early Chris- 
tian theology, and has ever since made it a system of Dual- 
ism instead of Monotheism. The Persian god of evil, Siva, 
became Satan, and has acted a most conspicuous part in the 
religion of the Christian world. Even at present his name 
is pronounced in the pulpit quite as frequently and with as 
much unction as that of God. 

Pantheism regards Creation as God. It was a favorite 
theory of the ancient philosophers, who advocated both its 
material and spiritual form. Creation is the result of the 
laws inherent in matter itself. Nothing is fortuitous ; all 
change is by the fixed fiat of law. God is the sun of 
Nature. Spiritual Pantheism is based on a metaphysical 
dream. God is the sun of the Spirit, fro*i whom every 
thing is evolved. He is ever the same, yet constantly un- 
folding into new forms. God only possesses substantiality. 
He becomes self-conscious only through man. This mysti- 
cal docrine is capable of many changes, and bewilders and 
deludes by seeming to present tangible ideas when it pre- 
sents only dreams. 



CHAPTER V. 

HISTORICAL REVIEW-MOWOTHEISM. 

In all departments, progress for the Indo-European people 
will consist in departing farther and farther from the" Semetic 
spirit. . . . Our religion will become less and less Jewish. 
Renan. 

Confined to narrow limits, and numerically insignificant 
compared with the other leading races, the Semite has 
made a deep influence both for good and for evil on the 
destinies of the world. It was first to engage in commerce, 
and invent a phonetic alphabet, which, more than any one 
cause, by the facilities it affords for the preservation of 
ideas, has tended to elevate mankind. From it sprang 
those great religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Moham- 
medanism. The character of this people is a reflection of 
the geography of the country they inhabit. Roaming the 
arid deserts, or concentrating around narrow fertile belts 
and centres of commerce, they were most deeply impressed 
with the stern and implacable aspect of Nature. Their be- 
lief in their own one god excluded all others, and reacting 
on their arrogance and self-conceit, made them intolerant 
and overbearing, and declare all religions but their own un- 
mitigatedly false. The Semetic race has never compre- 
hended civilization, never founded an organic empire, made 
any discovery in science or mechanical invention, or even 
produced a work of plastic art. Deficient in power of 
organization and discipline necessary for military under- 
takings, its battles have been fought by mercenaries. The 
Israelitish branch shows less aptitude for political life than 

54 



CHARACTER AND TENDENCIES OP JUDAISM. 5<) 

the others. It seems to have placed no value on liberty 
except so far as its religion was concerned, accepting vas- 
salage without a struggle if this was not interfered with. 
Their wisdom never surpassed parables and proverbs. 
Even the higher branch, the Arabians, were only able to 
seize for a brief time the products of Greek thought. Their 
science was only a miserable translation of the Greek sages; 
and it has been shown that even these translations were the 
work of Spaniards and Persians. Pure as are the moral 
precepts of Jesus, son of Sirach, or Hillel, or the Bible, 
they are not purer or more exalted than those of Grecian 
writers. The aphorisms by which the chief relations of 
morality are expressed are common to all peoples. Of all 
nations, the Jews should be the last to become the moral 
standard-bearers. They were hard, narrow, egotistical, 
arrogant, presuming, superstitious, ignorant, and a type of 
bigotry. Their dull minds received from their forced con- 
tact with Persia all the spiritualism which enlivens the 
dreary realism of their theology. At Babylon they imbibed 
the idea of angels and demons, the terrestrial manifestation 
of Deity, faith in immortality, resurrection of the body, 
Messianic longings, and belief in the near approach of the 
end of the world. Dwarfed in everything else, they were 
characteristically religious, but their religion had no rela- 
tion to their morality. David, with all his abominable 
vices, was a man pleasing to the Lord, and no one found 
fault with him. The Semitic standard w T as by no means 
such as Europeans would adopt. In religion, in its strictest 
interpretation, distinct from morality — the observance of 
rites and ceremonies, and the bigoted and superstitious 
opposition to innovation — the Jews are preeminent. They 
cannot be accused of being excessively moral, but their 
religion has bound them together and preserved them 
through the vicissitudes of two thousand years of oppres- 
sion. Utterly selfish from the beginning, they expressed no 
sentiment suggestive of the fatherhood of God or brother- 



50 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

hood of man. Jehovah was only a God of the Jews, and 
gave all other peoples to them to slaughter or enslave if 
they pleased. They did not wish to extend the sway of 
their religion. They sought not converts ; they rather 
objected to Gentile dogs professing their faith. Such was 
the Jewish spirit. It was concreted in a series of books 
called the Old Testament, pronounced an inspired writing, 
and really the means whereb} r its possessors achieved their 
lofty standing. The claim has been most unfortunate for 
mankind. The book cannot pretend to teach science, for 
whenever it attempts to explain natural phenomena it is 
raise. It is not to teach rules of government, for the pre- 
cepts it presents are in favor of theocracy, slavery, and 
despotism. If its mission is to teach morals, the national 
character was none the better for it, the Jews being among 
the most immoral and turbulent nations of antiquity. A 
compilation might be made from classic authors which 
would have a higher moral tone and fewer degrading exam- 
ples. It is only useful as part of a religious system exclu- 
sive and arrogant. Its critical study reveals the fact that 
the Hebrews were subject to the same law of development 
as other races. If they received a divine revelation, it did 
not change the course of evolution. Indelible traces of 
Fetishism are visible in their latest theology, and Polythe- 
ism was for ages entertained. Frequent reference is made 
to stsinge gods, whose existence is not denied. Jehovah is 
not the only god — he ia only the most powerful. The claim 
that he is the One God is of comparatively recent date. 
The character given him by the Old Testament is contra- 
dictory and changeable. He is the Creator and Divine 
Father, and again only the God of the Jews ; almighty and 
omnipotent, omniscient, eternal and unchanging, and again 
environed with all the limits of human nature. He walks 
on the earth, carries on conversation, sleeps, rises early in 
the morning, is angry, jealous, revengeful, vindictive and 
avaricious. The advance is easily traced. The family god 



MOX'AL INFLUENCE OP MONOTHEISM. 57 

became that of the nation, and at length the only God. 
Monotheism was attained in Palestine at nearly the same 
time it was in Greece. Human sacrifice to this god — most 
dreadful superstition! — lingered long in the Jewish mind. 
It is met with in the histories of all nations, and its ultimate 
form is the foundation of Christianity — the sacrifice of 
Christ. The offering of Isaac, and of his daughter by 
Jephthah in fulfillment of a vow — not rashly given, but on 
a momentous occasion — are not condemned, but rather con- 
sidered worthy examples of piety, showing beneath a black 
and fathomless abyss of superstition. 

The Aztecs furnish a striking example of this stage of 
religious thought carried to its fullness. Their vast pyra- 
mids were sacrificial mounds. The long line of priests 
winding up their steep sides, their summits crowned with 
gory altars where hecatombs of human victims were immo- 
lated with all the pageantry imagination could invent ; 
the shrine before which the palpitating hearts were placed 
by the red hands of the priest who rent them from the 
bosoms of the struggling victims, all were witnessed by the 
trembling thousands below, impressed with reverence by the 
dreadful spectacle. 

The progress from Fetishism, with its bloody sacrifices 
and horrid customs, to Monotheism is over an exceedingly 
long and bloody road, but one which has been traversed by 
all civilized nations. Religion by this progressive growth 
becomes a unit differing only in degree in its lowest and 
highest phases. The Hebrew prophets seem to have first 
received Monotheism, and to have attempted to raise the 
people out of Fetishism. The struggle was severe and 
bloody, the people often relapsing into grossest idolatry. 
They set up stone pillars, worshiped Ramphan and Chiun, 
made a golden calf after the bull Apis of the Egyptians, 
worshiped the serpent, and Baal, Astarte, Thammuz, and 
Moloch in the pure Fetish spirit, which was deeply im 
pressed on their laws, sacrifices, rites, prohibition of certain 



68 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

food, prescription of garments, and ornaments of the 
priests. 

The struggle between Monotheism and the old Polythe- 
istic faith was remorseless. Extermination of unbelievers 
is the divine charge. The Infinite Father God rides on the 
chariots of war and directs the conflict. Even in modern 
times, when the Moslem extended the sway of Monotheism 
with the sword, the most horrible cruelty was practiced ; 
and Christianity, forgetting its suffering founder and the 
lesson of love he inculcated, has unsheathed its sword and 
been equally remorseless. This is the dire result of relig- 
ion. Always claiming infallibility and absolute truth, it 
knows no mercy, pauses at no inhumanity, stays its hand at 
no crime. 

Fetishism, Polytheism, and Monotheism, are but expres- 
sions of one religion, differing only in degree. Standing on 
the high lands of science, looking down the interminable 
vista of the past, progress from animal worship and canni- 
balism to please God, the toil and struggle by which it has 
been achieved can be comprehended Although its phe- 
nomena shall all vanish, its rites and ceremonies — from the 
repast on human flesh, the quivering heart torn from the 
breast by the red-handed priest and thrown palpitating be- 
fore his god, to the sacramental supper of the blood and 
body of the crucified Jesus — sink like waves in the smooth 
expanse of ocean ; but the effects these have wrought on 
human progress shall not perish, for through them we 
breath the pure air of certain knowledge of the pres- 
ent. 

Monotheism is not the goal of this advance. It is only a 
temporary and incomplete expression of a great theory. It 
is the last term in a long series of expressions — the last, for 
beyond, theory yields to fact, empiricism to knowledge. 
The night of object-worship has vanished before the dawn 
of the day of thought. 

The age of Fetishism is the age of superstition ; both are 



THE NIGHTMARE OE RELIGION. 59 

products of ignorance and fear, and indivisible. In that 
brutal epooh when God is everything and man nothing, 
where the real requirements and objects of life are unknown, 
the mind prostrate with fear, the wildest fancies of man's 
relations to God prevail. He is the great chief, the great 
warrior of the universe. He requires all the petty servility 
of a tribal tyrant, and is enraged or pleased in a similar 
manner. Man he created for his own pleasure, and man 
must bow and be his slave. But he is thrown into dark- 
ness ; he cannot see the light nor understand what is 
wanted ; he can only be guided by his experience with his 
petty rules. In regard to the Infinite, he is in a cave, trav- 
eling a morass, mistaking the fantastic will-o'-wisps for the 
beacon-light of God's laws. He is fearful of enjoying him- 
self, for he may thereby incur the wrath of an offended 
Deity. He stands on some problem for which he fancies a 
solution, bases his conclusions on such false premises, and 
wanders world-wide from the truth. Matter and God are 
in antagonism. Man is a fallen being ; he has unpardona- 
bly offended the gods ; certain sacrifices are demanded as 
atonement. What a series of dogmas having no foundation 
in Nature, yet reacting with blasting effect! 

God is arbitrary in his demands. The choicest furs of 
the savage chase, the best part of the slain animal, the 
finest portion of the scant harvest, the best of the spoils of 
war are demanded of the devotee, who, so far as God is 
concerned, or in the recognition of his wishes, might as 
well be blind. Advancing, God demands greater sacrifices 
— the best of the flocks and herds, a certain portion of the 
captives made in war, unusually fine instruments of war, 
the immolation of members of the tribe or family. The 
despotic tyrant who rules the universe loves the smoke of 
reeking altars ; his nostrils dilate with the smell of blood ; 
the odor of rare and coitly spices is grateful to him. Isaac, 
the beloved son, is an accepted offering to the bloody Jeho- 
vah. Diana, in anger, demands the daughter of Agamem 



60 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

non. The watchful care of Terminus must be repaid by a 
victim. 

God will be aroused to sympathy and pity by cruelty 
inflicted upon ourselves. Lacerating the flesh with thongs 
— wearing haircloth until the bones are exposed by its con- 
stant chafing; standing on high pillars exposed to the 
pkiless elements; a living death in a cloister, cell, or dun- 
geon, plunged in the wilderness; denial of the healthy 
appetites; endurance of hunger, thirst, cold and Jieat — 
rejoices the heart of the relentless Deity. 

This is the nightmare of religion; nor has the age awak- 
ened out of the horrid dream. Ignorance is yet the master, 
and fear narcotizes mankind. Terrible dream ! Hell 
yawning beneath our feet, devils innumerable with infinite 
power, and a heartless despot — absolute in his egotism — 
overriding all ! 

Mankind have not awoke, except to gaze, as in twilight, 
between sleeping and waking. Fetishism maintains its 
hold, and superstition — like ragweeds, rank and foul — 
occupies the garden of the soul. 

The old Satan of Oriental theogony has a supreme place. 
Hell is still heated with burning sulphur. The Infinite 
Father is yet a God of battles. Man is a worm created for 
his iron feet to crush, or to hand over by the million to eter- 
nal torment. A priesthood despotically organized keeps 
the saddle and guides humanity with gag and spur. They 
demand observance of sacred days, have their sacred 
books, and prayers which are not to be omitted. God is 
not pleased that we place our children on altars and thrust 
the knife into their bosoms. He does not desire our ene- 
my's blood, or the flesh of our flocks, or the first of our 
harvest, but he de_nands the sacrifice of our pleasures; he 
wants us to weep and wail and crucify our spirits. He 
loves to have us sacrifice the appetites he has given us — the 
emotions of love and affection. He is pleased to have us 
cast reason aside for blind and unthinking faith, and re 



PERSECUTIONS BY CHRISTIANS. 61 

ceive the words of his priests as the ultimate of knowledge 
without questioning. 

The Indian loves tobacco, and he thinks the Great Spirit 
does also. The choicest bundle of leaves is placed on his 
altar. The priest hates*Yeason and knowledge ; he thinks 
his God must hate them too, and demands the civilized 
man to lay his reason on the altar of his conjuration. No ; 
Fetishism has not passed so long as Christian churches in 
their most sacred communion imitate the cannibal in his 
worship. He sacrifices the captive seized in war, and after- 
wards sits down to a horrid repast with his comrades. 
They meet, and in "lovefeast " break and eat the body and 
drink the blood of a crucified God ! 

"Oh!" you say, "it is only as a spiritual type." Do you 
forget that the great Church of Christianity holds unflinch- 
ingly that the words of a priest convert the bread and wine 
into real flesh and blood ? 

With the addition of hate, superstition becomes fanat- 
icism. Superstition and bigotry go mad. Becoming firml} 
persuaded that it3 dogmas are right, and all others wrong 
it wages an unconditional war of annihilation. Religion 
propagates itself by the sword. Mohammedanism has been 
long cited as its type, but it has drawn the sword no more 
than Christianity. 

Monotheism by its exclusiveness instills this venom into 
the veins of its believers. Polytheism, although occasion- 
ally spasmodically persecuting, knew nothing of this mode 
of proselytism. Yet this exclusiveness or persecution is 
not peculiar to Monotheism, only more persistent. The 
Egyptians were as exclusive as the Jews. It was pollution 
for them to drink from the same cup with one of another 
faith. So jealous were they of their gods, that to kill an ibis 
or a cat was a capital offense, and sufficient to drive a whole 
city to frenzy. Even the Greeks manifested this spirit in- 
herent in religion. Their laws against Atheism were 
severe. Many of their philosophers were exiled, and one 



62 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

at least answered with his life. Even the laws written by 
the philosophers for their imaginary republics were intol- 
erant. They in no instance recognized religious liberty. 
If the Christian system is right and true, bigotry is blessed; 
fanaticism, its intensest form, most pra'se worthy ; and 
persecution, proceeding to its direst extent, a blessing to 
the sufferers. For if believing as the Church believes is to 
save w from the everlasting tortures of hell-fire, does not 
the priestly inquisitor, who tears and bruises our flesh until 
our hardness of heart be overcome, and we follow his dic- 
tate?, confer a favor by bestowing on us the everlasting 
bliss of heaven ? Goodness and benevolence of heart wed- 
ded to ignorance has thus been corrupted, and it has been 
paradoxically but truly said, the better the ignorant man 
the more cruel he is as a persecutor. 

Christianity is said to be a religion of love, teaching the 
fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, and there- 
by changing his moral character. The real influence it has 
exerted may be read in history. Persecuted at first, it grew 
strong, and turning, it fleshed its fangs in its opponent. 
Read of the millions of martyrs bound to racks, burned at 
the stake, torn by red-hot hooks and pincers, starved, lacer- 
ated, buried in thick walls of masonry, suffering living 
deaths in foetid dungeons. Bead the narratives of religious 
wars — most terrible of wars — of massacres, of autos-da fe. 
Read of crusades sacrificing nations of warriors for the 
childish possession of a vacant sepulchre. Worse than all, 
view a great and gigantic power, having the control of the 
mental atmosphere of the world, stifling every new thought, 
every attempt at advancement ; claiming science and phi- 
losophy as tributaries, and as freely dictating in their realms, 
as freely employing the thumbscrew and dungeon on their 
votaries, as on heretics to its own incomprehensible va- 
garies. 

Christianity has assisted human advancement in the same 
manner that a brake assists the progress of a locomotive- 



CHRISTIAN FANATICISM AND CRUELTY. 63 

Its fanaticism forms a page of history unequaled in demo- 
niac cruelty — in foul and malignant venom — in that of any 
other faith. Professing universal love and peace, it has 
gone forth like one of the dreadful genii called into being 
by Arabian fancy — tbe Bible in one hand, a dripping sword 
and chains in the other, while from its black lips it has 
hoarsely shouted, "Believe or be damned !" Men ran wild 
at the approach of the goblin. Flagellants scattered them- 
selves in armies over Europe ; anchorites perched them- 
selves on towers ; hermits sought caves and mountains by 
thousands ; the whole world would turn monk or nun. 

It was high carnival. The day was darkened by the 
smoke of charring human flesh — the night illuminated with 
the blazing fagot. The plains of Europe were continually 
strewn with the wreck of armies bearing aloft the cross — 
emblem of the only true religion — engaged in exterminating 
warfare over unintelligible dogmas. 

Deep in dungeons, far from the blushing light of day, the 
pious inquisitor plied his dreadful trade, and holy priests 
and worshipful saints stood by and smiled when the tight- 
ening screws made the heretic writhe, or a moan to fall 
from his ashen lips. TThat were these holy men doing ? 
They were at the noblest of all possible employment — they 
were saving souls! They were compelling rebellious and 
ever simple human nature- to walk in the straight and nar- 
row way prescribed in the Bible and their creed. Alas! too 
well they plied their holy arts. The groans that ascend 
from the fields of battle are silenced by the cries from the 
dungeon, scaffold and gibbet, the never-ending wail of de- 
spair from the widow and orphan, where the minions of the 
Spectre have busily worked. 

With this black record of crimes ; with hands red with 
the blood of earth's bravest sons; with garments purple 
with clotted gore ; and with a history showing that she has 
fought to the death every advance of the race, cursed every 
new discovery in science, attempted to suppress every 



64 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

invention whereby the condition of mankind has been 
ameliorated ; always siding with tyranny, aristocracy, and 
slavery — Christianity has the effrontery to raise its voice 
and claim itself the cause of civilization ! The method it 
has pursued in advancing knowledge is unique. It wa^ by 
substituting a blind faith in the place of reason, creeds and 
dogmas in the place of knowledge, miracle in the place of 
law. It was by silencing Keplar, burning Giordano Bruno, 
imprisoning Galileo, opposing its flat earth to the schemes 
of Columbus, excommunicating the sciences, throwing them 
out of the schools it carefully controlled. Outside of the 
Church, despite its influence, with social ostracism and 
death suspended over them, daring students explored the 
secrets of Nature ; in seclusion others pursued philosophy ; 
others in the arena of politics studied national polity. By 
the concentration of all, the nations were forced onward, 
dragging this dead weight of creeds and dogmas which now 
claim to be the cause of the civilization attained. As well 
might it be claimed for a millstone suspended to the neck 
of a strong swimmer, because he sustained himself despite 
its weight, that it sustained him and preserved his life! 

At present, the fangs which projected from those gory 
lips cannot flesh themselves in the heterdox thinker. The 
talons are dulled and cannot lacerate, but the will remains 
as strong as ever. This hag, ignorant of Nature, of human 
nature, and of God — hating opposing beliefs, and trembling 
with brute fear — is subject to recurrent fits of madness. 
Within her influence the best emotions of mankind gather 
mould from the dank and blasting atmosphere. Outside of 
it, learning has thriven, morality waxed strong ; and Gov- 
ernments, upheld by the potent strength of Justice be- 
stowed by knowledge, chain Superstition and Fanaticism, 
and compel them to respect human rights. 



CHAPTER VI. 

VALUE OF THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS AND 
SACRED BOOKS AS AUTHORITIES. 

Hopeful and glorious are the times when men can exercise 
the right to speak and publish the truth.— Tacitus. 

The application of criticism to the Bible in the same 
manner that it is applied to other literary works is of recent 
date. The wonderful erudition of German scholars has 
yielded astonishing results in this field, and exalted criti- 
cism itself to the rank of a science. Most English and 
American theologians dispute their method, and maintain 
that dogmatic theology is the only means by which truth 
can be ascertained. They receive the Bible by unthinking 
and indiscriminating faith. 

If the Bible is of human origin, it is subject to the canons 
of criticism, like other human efforts ; if from God, the 
fact that it was revealed through the human mind and for 
human understanding makes it at most but a higher degree 
of human effort, and hence subject to the rules by which 
all such efforts are to be judged. The assumption and dog- 
matism of those who would introduce the Bible as super- 
natural into a natural world are fast meeting the disrespect 
they deserve. 

Subjected to this criticism— judged by human expedients 
—what is the result ? Historically, the Old Testament is a 
collection of all the books extant in the Hebrew and Chal- 
dee languages up to a certain period. These were believed 

65 



66 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS, 

to have been written by inspiration, by the Jews and Chris- 
tians; the apocryphal portion being of later production, and 
not sacred. 

Of the number of books in the Old Testament there is 
diversity of statement. Josephus makes twenty-two — the 
number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet ; others make 
twenty-seven ; the Talmud is not certain of twenty- four ; 
the number now retained is thirty-nine. In different man- 
uscripts the order in which they are placed varies, although 
their general arrangement is very old. The Apocrypha was 
at first only an addition to the Alexandrian version, and 
was first regarded as a whole by the Protestant. Luther 
arranged the books in a manner to please himself. 

The Bible is interesting as being one of the earliest writ- 
ten books, and hence preserving the oldest forms of 
thought. 

Who were its authors ? Moses is said to have written 
the Laws ; and it is certain that there was no literature 
before the school of Samuel. Critical acumen has determ- 
ined that the four books referred to Moses, and perhaps 
Joshua, were written in the age of Solomon ; Judges and 
Samuel still later ; and not until the eighth century before 
Christ were the oracles of the Prophets inscribed. After 
the exile, Ezra and Nehemiah wrote new books of their 
own, and perhaps glossed those already extant. The Pen- 
tateuch was completed about the time of Josiah ; the 
prophetic portion some time after Nehemiah ; the hetero- 
geneous Hagiographia was slowly accumulated as new 
Psalms were written and new prophets prophesied, and 
about the close of the Persian period became permanently 
arranged, Well knowing the story of the miraculous res- 
storation of the corrupted text to be a fable, theologians 
adhere to it for want of a more plausible explanation. 
That the priests preserved the national record is probable 
from their known office in other nations, and the character 
of the books themselves. Thus preserved, they slowly 



LOST JEWISH SCRIPTURES. 67 

accumulated during ages not characterized by activity of 
thought. The most ancient mention of the Old Testament 
collection was made 130 b. c, by Jesus, son of Sirach, but 
he does not declare it complete. Josephus enumerates 
twenty-two books, and places its conclusion in the time of 
Artaxerxes Longimanus. As the Jews regarded themselves 
as a sacred nation, everything pertaining to them, even 
their records, were sacred (Ex. xix., 6), and they regarded 
all their writers as divinely inspired. This was their earli- 
est belief ; but later, with the greater activity of thought, 
Ihey began to have doubts, and were conscious of the de- 
parture of inspiration. They had no means of drawing the 
line between the inspired and uninspired writings. Mala- 
chi, as the last of the Prophets, closed the glorious era of 
inspiration, according to the current belief, yet Jesus, son 
of Sirach, deserves the title of Prophet far more than many 
of those who are canonized. With the first Temple the 
spirit of inspiration departed, according to the Talmudists. 
The present Old Testament was by no means the only 
collection ; there were others equally venerated by their 
possessors. The Samaritans received only the writings of 
Moses, whom they regarded as the only great and true 
religious teacher directly inspired. The Alexandrian 
canon rejected the apocryphal books, adding them as an 
appendix. To obtain a clear idea of the text preserved, 
the books rejected and lost must be considered. Mention 
is made in the preserved sacred writings of other books 
equally valuable of which not a vestige remains. These 
are the Book of the Wars of Jehovah, Book of Jasher, 
Book of the Constitution of the Kingdom, Solomon's Three 
Thousand Proverbs, Solomon's Three Thousand and Five 
Songs, Solomon's Works on Natural History, Book of the 
Acts of Solomon, Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of 
Israel and of Judah, Chronicles of Kina; David, Books of 
Samuel the Seer, of Nathan, of Gad the Seer, Prophecy of 
Abijah, Book of Shemaiah, Book of Jehu, History of the 



68 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEA*. 

Book of Josiah, Sayings of Hosea, and a Second book of 
Lamentations. These represent a mass of revelation equal, 
if not superior, to that which has been preserved. The 
most fortuitous circumstances determined the loss or pres- 
ervation of these books— the whim of a priest; the accidents 
of war; the caprice of the possessor to change, mutilate, or 
destroy. Knowing this, well may it be asked how it is 
possible to be guided by a revelation one half of which is 
lost. Nor are we assured the lengthy list of titles of books 
irrecoverably lost embraces a tithe of those books which 
have not even left a recorded name. Yet this collection 
was received in its various versions by Jesus and his fol- 
lowers as sacred and authoritative. The IsTew Testament 
writers do not appear to have had the least idea that they 
were writing sacred books. They gave plain narratives of 
events, or simply letters to the churches, which were 
slowly gathered into the collection known as the New Tes- 
tament. Apostolic fathers rarely cite the apostolic writ- 
ings, only three vague allusions being made to them, and 
their mention of the Evangelists is equally uncertain. 
They allude to the Apochryphal Gospels in the same 
manner as to the genuine. In the time of Justin Martyr, 
who died one hundred and sixty-six years after Christ, the 
Gospels were not regarded as sacred writings. He men- 
tions them as " The Memories of the Apostles,'' and 
receives books now lost and rejects many now regarded as 
holy. Scarcely ten years later, Dionysius, Bishop of Cor- 
inth, refers to them as "The Scriptures of our Lord," 
showing the slow growth of the belief in the sacredness of 
the miscellaneous writings, and preparing the way for their 
collection. The first alluded to was in the possession of 
Marcion, and consisted of the Pauline Epistles and the 
Gospel of Luke. It was made in Pontus, and brought to 
Italy under the title of the "Gospel," or the " Apostle." 
About the beginning of the third century the extension of 
Christianity brought forward all the writings relating to 



TRANSLATION AND TRANSMISSION OF THE BIBLE. 69 

the subject from their ignoble obscurity, and the principal 
teachers quoted them as authorities. While the three great 
leaders, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Clement of Alexandria, 
agreed in receiving the four G-ospels, the Acts, thirteen 
Pauline Epistles, First Epistles of Peter and of John, and 
the Apocalypse; the first received the Second of John ; the 
second, the Epistle of Philemon and of Jude; the third, 
Hebrews, and quotes apocryphal Gospels — as that of the 
Egyptians — in the same manner as he olid the true. The 
idea of the sacredness of the writings had gained strong 
hold, and Irenaeus speaks of the "Divine Scriptures, ,, and 
as being " perfect, since they are dictated by the Logos of 
God and his Spirit." He, in unisoi* with Tertullian and 
Clement, thought the Holy Spirit dictated the words to the 
writers, and founded this claim on the internal evidence of 
the writings, the character of the writers, and tradition. 
They were satisfied with this test ; but its worthlessness is 
made apparent by their not agreeing among themselves on 
the position of many of these books — a failure more clearly 
manifested by an examination of the early Fathers. Who 
should be a better Judge than Origen? yet he rejected 
Hebrews, James, the Second Epistle of Peter, the Second 
and third of John, and Jude, receiving as inspired the 
Shepherd of Hermas and the Epistle of Barnabas. Euse- 
bius regarded the Epistles of James and Jude, the Second 
of Peter, the Second and Third of John, as disputed; and 
as spurious, the Acts of Paul, the Shepherd, the Apoca- 
lypse of Peter, and the Institutes of the Twelve Apostles. 
The Apocalypse of John and Hebrews were regarded as 
genuine by some and spurious by others. It would be 
interesting to know on what evidence the judgment rested. 
Outside of the spurious works, further removed from the 
genuine, were a host of others forged by heretics to support 
peculiar doctrines, and so plainly indicating their origin as 
to cause no discussion. Cyril (three hundred and forty - 
eight years after Christ) endorsed fourteen Epistles of Paul, 



70 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

and Athanasius accepted the Wisdom of Solomon, the Wis- 
dom of Sirach, Esther, Judith, Tobit, the Doctrines of the 
Apostles, and the Shepherds. 

The decisions of the Councils winnowed the vast accu- 
mulation of writings. The assembled priests assumed the 
right of condemnation, and exercised it most unsparingly. 
Those writings only were accepted as divine which ex- 
pressed the views of the majority of the Council ; but as the 
Councils were composed of different members whose Spin- 
ions varied, the decisions of one often reversed those of the 
others, and books now regarded as of vital importance, 
for centuries oscillated between canonical and apocryphal. 

Having learned by this brief outline the origin of the 
Bible, the wholly human means of its inception, we ask if 
the transmission of this holy compilation has been through 
pure and uncontaminating channels. If the Scriptures are 
inspired, and contain knowledge man in no other mannei 
can acquire, their value entirely depends on their absolute 
purity. It is not only essential that they be revealed, but 
also transmitted uncontaminated. 

The Hebrew, in which the greater portion of the Old 
Testament is written, is the the oldest or first developed of 
the Semitic languages, and its decline had set in when the 
later prophets wrote. After the exile it ceased to be 
spoken, and was familiar only to the learned, becoming 
virtually a dead language. Here is the cause of the vener- 
ation for the old books. They were written in a language 
understood only by the priests, who thus became necessary 
to interpret their hidden meaning to the people. Those 
who have studied modern languages of the same family as 
their own, and have attempted to perfectly translate ideas 
from one to the other, will appreciate the task of translat- 
ing this oldest of written tongues. The spirit of the words 
has wings, and no power can retain it. The difficulty here 
is augmented by the scantiness of explanatory materials. 
The Rabbins were not agreed two thousand years ago on 



NUMBERLESS VERSIONS OF THE BIBLE. 71 

the meaning of important passages, yet their traditions are 
relied on by one school as of great importance, while held 
in contempt by another. 

The old versions have been employed to gain a meaning, 
of the original Hebrew, as well as the Alexandrian, Syriac, 
Arabic of Rabbi Saadia ; Gaou, Vulgate, and Chaldee para- 
phrases. Not understanding the original Hebrew, the 
expounder would learn how to correctly translate from the 
translations made into Greek, Arabic, Syriac, Chaldee, and 
Latin. If these earlier translators were not inspired equally 
with the original penman, what surety is there of their 
freedom from error, or that they express the word of 
God? 

The Alexandrian version, or Septuagint, is of unknown 
origin, Eichhorn and others having incontestably proved 
the story of the seventy-two learned Jews producing it at 
the instance of Demetrius Phalereus a fable. It was not 
only used by the Greeks, but by the Jews themselves, until 
in combats with the Christians they were compelled to 
retreat to the original Hebrew, and finding the version 
incorrect, began to detest it. 

Aquila, in the beginning of the second century, made a 
literal translation into Greek, which the Jews preferred to 
the Septuagint. Some of the early Fathers accuse him of 
falsifying to overthrow the testimony respecting Christ, 
but others quote him without remark when his text applies 
to their doctrines better than the Septuagint. The dissatis- 
faction with the latter version appears from the numerous 
others constantly being made, for even then the greatest 
difficulty was experienced in obtaining the real significance 
of the Hebrew words and phrases. Origen attempted to 
show the errors by publishing various esteemed versions in 
parallel columns, to find his labor result in a most fearful 
corruption of the text. Careless and designing copyists 
misplaced the names of the versions, omitted or misplaced 
the critical marks, and passages from other Greek, versions, 



73 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

written in the margin, were copied into the body of the 
work. 

This corrupt text reacted on the Septuagint, revisions of 
which were made with a liberal hand by successive copy- 
ists, until it became almost equally corrupt. Lucian and 
Hesychius, three hundred and eleven years after Christ, 
wrote a corrected copy, which was considered as the best 
authority by Jerome, from whom we learn that among the 
various churches the different editions of the Septuagint 
were in use. He wrote: " The common edition is different 
in different places the world over. . . . It is corrupted 
everywhere to meet the views of the place and time, or the 
caprice of the transcribers." 

Of the Latin versions from the Greek text, Augustine 
says they cannot be counted. These had become more cor- 
rupt than the Greek. Jerome says: "For the most part, 
among the Latins there are as many different Bibles as 
copies of the Bible; for every man has added or subtracted 
according to his own caprice, as he saw fit. " He was so 
disgusted with this sacrilegious transcription that he under- 
took a Latin version direct from the Hebrew. It met with 
great opposition at first, but came into general use, and 
shared the fate of its predecessors in becoming corrupted 
by the carelessness or design of transcribers. 

How easily this was accomplished cannot be compre- 
hended in this age of printed books, when a thousand or 
ten thousand copies are printed exactly alike. As all the 
various translations were used, students would write on the 
margins of their copies corresponding passages and extracts 
from other versions, and erase and correct when they 
thought errors had been made. In transcribing, the zeal- 
ous believer interpolated or blended passages^ omitted or 
inserted words, often to explain or to adapt the passage to 
singing. Even pillars of the Church, in order to sustain 
their dogmas, erased or inserted passages to uphold their 
doctrines. Those who re-transcribcd often placed the mar- 



GENUINENESS OF THE BIBLE. 73 

ginal notes in the body of the work, or re-corrected from 
other manuscripts they believed more correct. 

The Vulgate having thus become exceedingly corrupt, in 
802 Charlemagne appointed Alcuin to correct it, and or- 
dered the reception of his copy. 

In the eleventh century, Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canter- 
bury, undertook a new revision; and in the twelfth, Cardi- 
nal Nicolaus applied himself to the never-accomplished 
task. Bacon repeatedly testifies to the failure to improve 
the corrupted text. The translators and expounders were 
all human. 

With the discovery of printing and the unprecedented 
multiplication of copies, the necessity of a correct text be- 
came of utmost consequence. The Council of Trent at 
once silenced, in a manner peculiar to infallible power, all 
discussion by declaring that the Yulgate should be held 
authentic — the Church furnishing the text — and all private 
editions should have no authority. At that time, in this 
same Church-established text, Isidore Clarius pointed out 
eighty thousand errors. To crown this most stupendous 
imposition, the Pope, as infallible head of the Church, 
undertook to furnish the authentic edition both of the Old 
and New Testaments, which were published as infallible, 
and to add to or extract from which was prv. nounced a crime. 
After this brief review, in the light of history, what is 
the evidence of the genuineness of the Bible ? The Old 
Testament was written we know not when or by whom. 
It is the fragments of literature of an insignificant people, 
written in a dead knguage, the key to which is lost. Its 
translation two thousand years ago was extremely difficult. 
The New Testament was written at the close of the first 
and during the second century. Its authors are unknown. 
Its compilation was accomplished by a most singular 
method. The divine character of its books was determined 
by human reason, which rejected and destroyed all those 
books in any way opposed to the orthodox faith. Thus 



74 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

obtained, the text was corrupted by ignorance, carelessness 
or design, until — wb ether Latin, Greek, or Hebrew — it 
became concealed beneath the accumulated rubbish. From 
this source the modern translations were made. 

Protestantism has worked its way back to the Jewish 
canon and the Greek, thus illuminating, as it asserts, the 
errors of translation and transcription ; but this is more 
ai parent than real, as the text was corrupted in the origi- 
nal beyond all critical power to renovate. This Catholicism 
acknowledged, and by a decision of one of its Councils 
(Trent) declared the Latin Vulgate the absolute Scriptures 
which if any one despise, "let him be accursed." The 
Catholic bows in acquiescence to the Council ; the Protes- 
tant points scornfully to the proven fallibility of the Coun- 
cils, and is assured they have no right to issue such a decree. 
Yet this decree of the majority in Council is the basis on 
which the New Testament rests its claims to inspiration. 

First there were miscellaneous writings read for instruc. 
tion, but not considered divine. After a century or more 
they began to be in great esteem and to be slowly collected, 
the dominant sect holding to those which best agreed with 
its doctrine, and rejecting the othe-rs as spurious. This 
process continued until a compilation was effected, and the 
party receiving it had power to decree the collection the 
only true and inspired writings. Who dare deny that the 
reception or rejection of one and all of these books, now 
considered as divine authorit}^ did not rest on human judg- 
ment ? Is it possible that a direct revelation from God 
would be subject to such test or accompanied with such 
obscuriiy? If God should make a revelation, it would 
come indisputable as the sun of morning, and no holy 
father, pious priest, or bigoted Council be called on to 
decide which portions should be retained or rejected. 
This conclusion follows as a logical necessity. If the early 
Fathers or the Catholic Councils had power to determine 



THE RIGHT OF PRIVATE JUDGMENT. 75 

the true from the erroneous, every m£n now has the same 
power and the granted right to revoke the decisions of all 
his predecessors. History reveals the human origin of the 
books themselves, and exposes the superstition and arro- 
gance of those who collected them, and compelled the 
acknowledgment of the divine character of their work. 
They were simply men, often ignorant, always prejudiced 
by their religion, and the only right they had to sit in judg- 
ment was their own conceited bigotry. The whole world 
is open to every human soul, and none have the right to 
foreclose their opportunity. 



CHAPTER VII. 

MAN'S MORAL PROGRESS DEPENDENT ON ZlS 
INTELLECTUAL GROWTH. 

If the Jews had not made a beginning, some other nation 
would have offered the requisite organs, and those organs 
would have guided the advance in precisely the same manner, 
only transferring to some books, now probably lost, the sacred 
character which is still attributed to others.— Comte. 

All civilized races of men have books which they regard 
as sacred, and to which they refer their knowledge of 
moral law and the foundation of religion. Such books 
are accepted as direct revelations from their God. They 
all — Vedas, Shaster, Koran, Testament (Old and New) — 
make one claim of divine origin, its consequent infallibility, 
and that they are absolutely essential for man's under- 
standing of the will of his Maker. 

As the Bible is more intimately related to us, and as we 
regard no other volume as sacred, it may be regarded as a 
type of all others. We shall reach the conclusion, if we 
investigate this realm over which superstition has spread 
for immemorial time her forbidding pinions, that mankind 
have derived little benefit from their moral codes except as 
they have comprehended them by their intellect. Man's 
moral progress has been and is equivalent to intellectual 
growth. Until moral truths become the property of the 
intellect they remain barren beliefs, or united with super- 
stition are productive of great evil, 



ILLOGICAL POSITION OF PllOTESTANTISM. 77 

In the vast volume of universal history not one page can 
be pointed out wherein Christianity contributed to social or 
intellectual advancement. On the contrary, it has invari- 
ably arrayed itself with the Old, and by every possible 
means sought to retard humanity's growth. This is its 
necessary position; it is a part of the Old, and must battle 
for it. Claiming the infallibility conferred by direct in- 
spiration, it cannot retract. Its creed renders growth 
impossible. A perfect God writes word by word a perfect 
infallible revelation for infinite time and generations. Such 
a revelation cannot expand — it is complete and finished. 
To add thereto is to blemish. Thus presented, the Church 
divides on the method of its interpretation. The Protestant 
gives to each man the right to interpret for himself. In 
this it is most illogical; for how is a finite, imperfect, fal- 
lible being to interpret and comprehend an infinite, 
infallible revelation ? When the right of reason is granted, 
the finite and fallible status of the Bible is acknowledged. 
The right to reason presupposes the right to receive or 
reject; for of what use is reason unless this right is granted? 
Protestantism founders in this absurdity. Really occu- 
pying the identical grounds of Catholicism, it grants the 
right to reason, but refuses the right of rejeetion; it says: 
"Believe, or be damned." Reason may exercise itself on 
the Bible, but in such a manner as to receive it. If infal- 
lible, reason is needless — if infinite, it is impossible. 
Protestantism denies both these qualities when it assumes 
the right of private judgment and breaks the path for radical 
Infidelity. If Luther, Calvin, or Melancthon has the right 
to protest against Rome, Beecher, Murray, or Parker may 
protest against them, and the end is a universal individual 
protest, there being as many sects as persons, and thorough 
and complete individualization. 

Catholicism maintains the severest logic. It stifles reason 
at the beginning. It truly says finite man cannot compre- 
hend an infinite revelation; hence God has chosen teachers 



78 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

to interpret his revelation; the priesthood is as necessary 
as the Bible itself; to ordinary men it is a book written in 
a foreign tongue, and the inspired priest only can translate 
and apply it to mortal wants. 

How far has the intellectual life of the race been bene- 
fitted by the Bible ? It cannot claim scientific accuracy or 
knowledge, for it accepts the views of Nature received by 
the rude and savage Semitic people. They believed the 
world to be a perfectly square and flat island floating on 
the water beneath the firmament. It was stationary, and 
the sun, moon, and stars revolved around it. This is the 
accepted theory of the Bible, and so understood by its 
believers, and scarcely three centuries have passed since 
the man would have been burned who dared to assert 
otherwise. Its cosmogony is that of conjecturing ignorance. 
Did not God know that his world was a ball, and the sun- 
not the earth — was the central body ? Knowing these 
facts, he writes the very reverse in his revelation, leaving 
those whom he seeks to enlighten by his revelation to dis- 
cover the truth by painful research. 

It is urged that this is a wrong view of the intentions of 
the Deity. He adapted his words to the comprehension of 
the savage Hebrew. He would not have been understood 
had he spoken in the phrase of modern science. He adapt- 
ed his words to their comprehension. This revelation, then, 
becomes a special affair for the exclusive benefit of a small 
tribe, and cannot be urged on the present; for if intended 
for infinite generations it must have infinite extension and 
application. 

It is interesting to trace the progress of ideas and the slow 
yielding of the interpretation of the Bible. From the dawn 
of Science to the present a constant battle has been waged. 
Every new truth is fought to the death, and after the Church 
finds it cannot withstand it, it turns and claims it for its 
own. Geology dealt the death-blow to the Mosaic cosmog- 
ony. The earth created in six days ? Turn over the leaves 



WAR BETWEEN SCIENCE AKB THE BIBLE. 79 

of the grest rock-volume, stratum reposing upon stratum 
for fifteen miles of crust, replete with vestiges of organic 
beings, once swimming, flying, ere ping, or walking, suc- 
cessively evolved while millions of millions of ages rolled 
away. A billion years is but a single swing of the pendu- 
lum which marks the progressive evolution of worlds. 
Geology and Genesis can never be reconciled. The story 
is not an allegory, but an attempt of the ignorant savage 
mind to account for phenomena it did not comprehend. It 
is the same with all its pretended explanations, as witness 
that of the rainbow. It is not the sunbeam painting itself 
on the descending drops of the shower, but a sign set by 
God after the Flood for the comfort and assurance of Noah, 
and for a thousand years this interpretation prevailed. 
Now we know that a thousand of ages before Noah's time, 
on the wild and desolate shores of the new red sandstone 
the winds blew the raindrops, and can we suppose that 
when those dark showers rolled away, and the low sun 
shone on their pearly drops, no rainbow gorgeously deco- 
rated their dark garments ? 

After the great battle waged on the intellectual field, it 
is again urged that it is not to teach science, not for intel- 
lectual progress, but as a revelation of morals, the Bible 
was given to man. It was taken as a standard for the intel- 
lect as long as the claim could be maintained, and only by 
compulsion did it relinquish its blighting grasp. Is there 
better foundation for its claims as the sole teacher of moral 
truth ? Does it teach any truths man would not have 
arrived at without its aid ? It is claimed that it does, and 
the same claims are made for all sacred books. Against 
this assertion, so arrogantly maintained, a volume of 
extracts, wise sayings, and proverbs might easily be com- 
piled from classic writers and the records of remote and 
even barbarous peoples, which would be in every respect 
equal or superior to the Bible. What is there in the famous 
Sermon on the Mount not well known before the first cen- 



80 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

tury ? Confucius, more than five hundred years previously, 
taught a cede equally pure. The vaunted Golden Rule 
was expressed by the Chinese sage, and about the same 
timp by Pythagoras in Greece. Were not the ancients 
moral? Witness their laws and customs. Do they not pre- 
sent lives favorably comparable with the most shining exam- 
ples of Christian virtue ? Plato and Socrates were equal 
in forgiveness of enemies, in patient endurance of sufiering, 
in all the virtues bestowed by religion on any Christian 
saint. 

But it is said, although the ancient sages wrote wisely 
and spoke truthfully, though their lives put to blush those 
of a vast majority of Christians, they could not agree 
respecting the foundation of virtue, the ultimate object 
towards which it should be directed, or in what man's hap- 
piness consisted. This is a singular objection from the 
Christian world, who never could agree, with all the light 
of their revelation, on these same questions, who from the 
apostles' time have disputed with word and sword, and are 
now divided into more than a thousand contending sects. 

Nothing is more obvious than the independence of ethics 
of revelation. Revelation is only its accidental expression. 
This is proven by the fact that all moral truths expressed 
in the Bible were clearly recognized for indefinite time 
before its presentation. It abounds in precepts good of 
themselves, though not original with it, but as a moral 
code it is exceedingly imperfect. So far from pointing 
man to the eternally true and right, in the hands of its 
interpreters it has taught the opposite of truth and blinded 
those who would see. It advocates slavery. The chosen 
men of God are slaveholders. He urges them to battle, 
assists them to gain the day, and directs them how to 
divide the spoil of captive wives, mothers, and maidens. 
If in the terrible ordeal of slavery through which we have 
passed, the slaveholder found consolation anywhere, it was 
in the Bible. He fought under the direct command of God, 



T#E BIBLE AN IMPERFECT MORAL CODE. 8i 

who cursed Ham, and his posterity, and declared it just 
that they should be bondsmen and bondswomen for all 
time. So directly did the Bible oppose anti-slavery that 
its only agitators threw it down and trampled it in the 
dust. 

It upholds capital punishment. Its cede is a code of 
vengeance, and although the great thinkers of the day, one 
and all, oppose the death penalty, and the refined sense of 
the age revolts at it as a relic of barbarism, the prejudice 
created and sustained by religious education founded on 
the Bible preserves it as a black and dismal blot on our 
civilization. It holds woman in her present unequal posi- 
tion with man, and sets itself directly in the way of her 
advancement. One of the most startling miracles recorded 
in the Old Testament is the standing still of the sun and 
moon to enable the Israelites, pushed on by God, to 
slaughter their enemies. A religion of peace ? The mill- 
ions that have perished in its wars are a minority of those 
who have fallen victims to the stake, the gibbet, and name- 
less instruments of torture, or suffered a thousand dealhs 
in reeking dungeons, with iron links festering their flesh, 
without appeal and without hope. The Church has arro- 
gated to itself the anthority to do for the living as it be- 
lieves their God does for nine-tenths of the dead — created a 
hell, and carried out his commands by commencing those 
tortures which he will intensify and continue forever. 

For the Bible, it is claimed that the human mind could 
not unaided have arrived at its moral code. Surely the 
mind of man could not have obtained a just conception of 
the angry, jealous Jehovah, whose garments were dytd 
red with the blood of the slain; his creation of the world 
in six days and then resting; his creation of life and light 
before he created the sun; his creating man perfect, and 
man's becoming a most pitiably imperfect work; his 
drowning all the world except eight souls, who became 
worse than those destroyed; his self-sacrifice on the cross 



82 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

as the only means of reclaiming a moiety of mankind from 
the innate and all-powerful principle of evil. This only 
can be learned by such a revelation. After its acquisition, 
it requires thousands of years to rid mankind of its incubus. 
At this stage of the discussion we ask, can a book bring 
new moral truth to man ? Can he be taught that which is 
not inherent in his constituton ? The horse cannot com- 
prehend mathematics because the mental qualities necessary 
are dormant or absent, nor can it understand moral rela- 
tions for the same reason. The same is true oV man. 
Unless he has the moral qualities, moral truths would fall 
as unappreciated before him as the animal. He must first 
possess these moral qualities in order to receive a revelation, 
and possessing them, they evolve moral truths, and a reve- 
lation is not required. 

Do not understand that I cast reproach on the Bible. I 
place it with the sacred books of otlrer races — the Avesta, 
the Shaster, the Vedas, the Koran — and consider them all 
as equally creditable records of the strivings and spiritual 
experiences of childish and savage men to fathom and 
comprehend the mysteries of the spiritual universe within 
and the illimitable universe without. One has no more 
right to command belief than another. Truths are beauti- 
fully expressed by all, but no new ones are revealed. They 
repeat what is inherent in the constitution of man. If all 
sacred books were blotted from the world this day, not a 
single truth would be lost. The reception of or acquies- 
cence in an ethical system, in order to work a lasting 
benefit, must not be by belief, but by knowledge. The 
system must meet an intellectual development competent 
to understand and make it its own. It is asserted that the 
simple belief has power to elevate. Most mischievously 
false is the assertion. Belief is a dead dogma, and if the 
believer advances, it is not from the power of his belief, 
but by intellectual progress. This is demonstrated by the 
results of missionary labors. Glowing narrations are pub- 



FUTILITY OF MISSIONARY EFFORTS. 83 

lished of conversions of the natives of the farthest islands 

of the sea, and the glorious results wrought by the Bible 
amongst the savages of the frozen north or the burning 
equator. The zealous missionaries appear to think baptism 
of the natives indicative of their reception of Christianity. 
''Blessed book !'' say they, "wherever thou goest. civiliza- 
tion aud innumerable blessings follow." Oh, missionary ! 
it is not with the Bible that civilization goeth forth, but 
with the self-reliant Anglo-Saxon. Are savage men changed 
to Christians ? Nay; they vanish like frost before the sun 
of intelligence. It is not conversion, but the terrible, inev- 
itable law of extinction which is brought into operation. 
The Red Indian, from a race holding a vast continent, has 
become a remnant fast expiring — not driven westward, as 
is poetically said, but dying out, as the wolf and deer, on 
the place of their birth. 

The Missionary Herald says that " only seven per cent of 
the population of Ceylon (2,009,000) should profess Chris- 
tianity, and that only two per cent should be Protestant 
Christians, will be melancholy facts pregnant with solemn 
reflections to many of our readers. v 

Again: " If ours is the day of small things, what can we 
say to India with her 200,000,000 against our 2,000,000 and 
her less than half a million Christians, say one fourth of 
one per cent, against our seven per cent.' ,, 

"The account Mr. Monger (missionary) gives of the 
present state and prospects of the Mahratta mission i 
encouraging. Less than a dozen persons constitute his Sab- 
bath audience, and these are from his own family, and the 
Christian household connected with the mission.'' 

Of the Chinese missions the Herald says, "The pig-tail 
celestials of the flowery kingdom do not take very kindly to 
Christianity. TVith twenty-four missionaries and fifteen 
native helpers in China, the American Foreign Mission 
organization reports the baptism of the first convert." 

The Daily Witness, Montreal, 1866, says: "There are now 



84 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

twenty-five Protestant missionary societies laboring in 
India. These societies maintain about five hundred and 
fifty missionaries, and expend annually in that country not 
farlrom $1,550,000." 

The Spaniards converted the swarming population of 
Mexico and Peru; where now are their converts? A 
charming story, highly suggestive, is related of an Aztec 
tribe. They were readily persuaded to demolish their idols 
and set up the cross in their places, and Cortez left them, 
fully persuaded that they were true believers. It ^so hap- 
pened that one of his horses was disabled and left with 
them. Alas for the worship of the true God ! The super- 
stitious natives, connecting the unknown animal with the 
power of the white man, worshiped it as a deity, gave it 
flowers and savory viands; and when it pined and died on 
such inappropriate diet, its afflicted worshipers reared its 
effigy in stone, and a century later, when the Franciscans 
came to preach the Gospel, they were astonished to find 
this image of a horse occuping the highest place in the 
temple, and devoutly adored as the god of thunder and 
lightning. The native mind found its level in worship, 
despite the efforts of the conqueror to force the mystifica- 
tion of the Trinity on the untutored intellect. Were the 
Aztecs converted ? They are gone, and not one remains to 
read the hieroglyphic tablets of their ancestors. Is the 
Bible more deadly than the rifle ? 

One of the most active and zealous missionaries on the 
African coast confessed that he never converted a single 
African. Once he thought he had succeeded, but his new 
convert, on being informed that he must deny himself a 
plurality of wives, at once denied his religion. Dr. Liv- 
ingstone says that forty missionaries were sacrificed to the 
deadly climate of Africa before a single convert was made. 
After the vast outlay of missionary labor, there is not an im- 
portant Christian community of their founding constructed 
of heathen elements. The churches of China and Japan are 



FUTILITY OF MISSIONARY EFFORTS. So 

fonnded on sand, and despite the intellectual culture and 
resources of the Jesuits, crumbled. The battle between 
Christianity aud the great Asiatic religions— Buddhism, 
Brahminism, and Islamism — has not been more fortunate. 
Is.lamism has gained the ascendency in Africa, and is fast 
conquering that continent. 

Mr. Hutchins gives the results of ten years' attendance 
at a mission school on the west coast of Africa in the 
answer of his servant when asked what he knew of God: 
"God be very good; he made two things— one, sleep; and 
the other, Sunday, when no one has to work." He says 
that after scores of years of intercourse with European 
traders and missionaries, the Africans still cling "to their 
gis-gis, jujus, and Fetishism with as much pertinacity as 
they did many hundred years ago. . . . Here we have 
all the appliances of our arts, our sciences, and our Chris- 
tianity, doing no more good than did the wheat in the 
parable, that was sown among briers and thorns. To 
attempt civilizing such a race before they are humanized 
appears to me beginning at the wrong end." Hamilton 
Smith remarks, u Even Christianity of more than three 
centuries' duration in Congo has scarcely excited a pro- 
gressive civilization." ISTo people have more direct com- 
munication with Europe than the Africans, amongst whom 
Christian bishops achieved renown in the times of the 
primitive fathers, and in modern times numerous mission- 
ary stations have been maintained at great sacrifice of 
money and of life, yet no visible effect has been produced 
towards civilizing the black race. The people of the 
torrid zone find in the picturesque and passional teachings 
of Moslemism greater satisfaction than in the colder and 
more intellectual forms of Christianity. Where Chris- 
tianity is apparently received, it proves in the end only a 
form, and its transcendent doctrines are changed into 
crudest Paganism. Humboldt saw in the Cordilleras a 
savage crowd dancing and brandishing their war-hatchets 



86 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

around an altar where a monk was elevating the Host. 
They simply transferred their war dance around a fire to an 
altar. Savary states that no Indian has ever become a true 
Christian, Mr. Kennon, in one of his popular lectures on 
Northeastern Asia, said the missionaries found it impos- 
sible to convey any idea of God or of tiie atonement to the 
Yakuts, because their language had no words for any of the 
high moral conceptions of Europeans. The want of such 
words indicates the want of the ideas tbey express — a 
deficiency supplied only by ages of growth. The^ Greek 
priest hangs a cross on the neck of the low-browed, skin- 
clad Yakut, and reports to St. Petersburg another remark- 
able conversion to Christianity. The Pagan rites and 
frantic ceremonies of the Egyptians are now enacted before 
the churches of the Copts, as described by Herodotus, 
earliest of historians. 

The Greeks still preserve their "Phyrric" dance; the cel- 
ebrated chorographic dance of the ancient Romans is 
yet preserved by the Wallachian peasantry, showing how 
much stronger are customs wrought by indigenous religious 
faiths than foreign systems, even if they be apparently suc- 
cessful. Wm. H. Seward, in his " Travels Around the 
World," p. 456, agrees with this universal testimony of 
unprejudiced observers. His opinion has vastly more 
weight than those of ordinary travelers, for he possessed 
superior advantages, and he certainly will not be accused 
of granting more than it was impossible to avoid against 
the benefits of missionary labor. "It was not for St. 
Xaviernor the Catholic Church of the 16th century to bring 
India and the East into Christian civilization. It must be 
sadly admitted that this remains yet to be done. It is to 
be hoped that the great work has been begun in the humble 
schools for the native men and women which have been 
opened under missionary auspices in various parts of the 
country." This is virtually yielding the whole question. 
It is not religion taught by the missionary, it is knowledge 



RELIGION ORGANICALLY OPPOSED TO PROGRESS. 87 

taught in the schools which is expected to elevate Hindoo 
civilization. 

Who can dissent from Kenan, when he says: " As to the 
savage races, those sad survivors of an infant world, for 
whom nothing better can be wished than a quiet death, it 
is almost derision to apply our dogmatic formulas to them. 
Before making Christians of them, we should first have to 
make them men, and it is doubtful if we should succeed in 
doing that. The poor Otaheitan is trained to attend mass 
or sermon, but the incurable softness of his brain is not 
remedied: he is only made to die of melancholy or 
ennui. Oh 1 leave these children of nature to fade away on 
their mother's bosom. Let us not with our stern dogmas, 
the fruit of twenty centuries of reflection, disturb their 
childish play, their dances by moonlight, their hour of 
sweet intoxication." The mistake of devotees is in the 
belief that morals or religion can be manufactured and 
forced on the mind. They create their formulas, which 
they call religion, and regard the observation of these as 
conversion. This process may be very well here where 
educational prejudice is in their favor, when they cannot 
depart very far from the generally received ideas, but when 
they attempt by such means to storm the religion of other 
races, they without exception utterly fail. True conversion 
to our transcendental morality is as possible as the domes- 
tication of the tiger or lion; they cannot comprehend our 
lofty Idealism. This is a question of anatomy and physi- 
ology. Its solution depends on the structure and resulting 
functions of the brain. When the savage is able to grasp 
the sciences with the acumen of the European, then and 
not till then can he be truly converted to the European's 
religion. His thoughts, desires, emotions, character, are 
what his organization compels; consequently his organiza- 
tion must be changed before any change of character can 
be expected. Christianity, born from the debris of imme- 
morial ages, has grown with the growth of the people who 



S8 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

accept it, and is the representative of their theological ideas, 
Now go to the wilds, and, meetiiag a savage trained in 
another school in all respects different, thrust this system 
upon his attention. Ee is utterly incapable of its compre- 
hension. There is a wide interval between the ravage and 
the philosopher. We have passed over by slow and painful 
progress through millions of ages. The savage may 
receive aid from our acquirements, but we cannot bridge 
the interval, nor construct a shorter road for his progress 

Religion is organically opposed to progress. The for- 
mulas of religion must of necessity be sacred and inviolable; 
they cannot yield, and soon are left behind. Then com- 
mences the great struggle, not to cease until the reign of 
perfect knowledge. On one side will be constant effort to 
extend the domain of knowledge — on the other, persecu- 
tion; for with the belief in infallibility comes the right of 
enforcing that belief, and faith and bigotry always are 
in exact ratio to ignorance. There is no limit to the illustra- 
tions history furnishes of this subject. Failh in a religion 
not understood always results in bigotry, superstition, intol- 
erance, and persecuticn. It might as well be said that a man's 
coat influenced his mind as that he is organically changed 
by an exotic system of religion. A church member, a 
bigot, a fanatic are easily made, but an organically good 
and upright man is good and upright from development, 
and cannot be made to order. 

In Robespierre and Condorcet, history has furnished 
examples of the conduct of life of a man biased in early 
life by his religions instruction, and of the self-sustaining 
manhood, developed by intellectual and moral culture 
The picture is drawn in strongest colors, and the nobility 
in life, and philosophical calmness at the approach of 
death manifested by the latter, are presented in strong con- 
trast with the pitiless cruelty in life, and shrinking from 
death of the former. 

Robespierre was educated a protege of the Church, and 



ROBESPIERRE AND CONDORCET. 89 

was deeply imbued with the dogmas of religion. A. scholar 
of the Jesuits, his morality was such as the Church bestows. 
That he was not an inquisitor was determined by his cir- 
cumstances. He pledged himself to certain political dis- 
tractions, and in their defense and extension, as remorse- 
lessly shed the blood of hecatombs of victims ag the priest 
sacrifices to convictions. 

By nature of tender feeling; resigning his office on 
being compelled to pass sentence of death; trembling even 
at the sight of blood, he became the most loathsome mon- 
ster on whom the light of day ever shone. Having in- 
flamed the populace, until, in obedience to his will, they 
sacrificed on the guillotine, amid shouts of joy, their king, 
their queen, their nobility, and decimated even the ranks 
of the people, he with priestly audacity pronounced an 
oration on the value of morality, religion, and a belief in 
a Supreme Being, and organized a festival to the latter, in 
which he officiated as high priest. The most sacred 
and holy of all missions to him was a revival of the relig- 
ious sentiment of the French people. Only two days after 
this extraordinary display of folly, he prepared to change 
the revolutionary tribunal, so that be might be able to 
destroy his opponents, not by the slow process of single 
condemnation, but by scores and hundreds, thus wielding 
absolutely a dictatorship of the scaffold. By this last ter- 
rible engine he himself was crushed, and when his head 
fell beneath the same axe to which he had so remorselessly 
consigned such multitudes of true and noble men and 
women, in allusion to the worship of the Supreme, of 
which he would be high priest, a spectator said, "Yes, 
Robespierre, there is a God 1" 

Condorcet, cast on these same troublous times, made no 
pretense to religion. His intellect was keen and cul- 
tivated. Thrown into a dungeon, and hourly awaiting 
the execution, he called for a pen, thinking to leave a 
defense. "A defense of his personal actions and opinions! 



90 CAREER OP RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

Sbonld he, when so little time was spared, waste it in such 
idle manner ?" No, he reproved himself, and casting 
aside such vanities, he sat down amid the roar of conflict- 
ing factions; the din of revolution already saturated with 
blood; in his cell, hearing the wails of ten thousand broken 
hearts, and the famishing cries of a whole nation, and 
with a sublime i'aith sought to prove human progress r.nd 
the ultimate perfectibility of man ! With far-reaching 
sight he looked beyond the petty accidents of his time, to 
the magnificent result of future ages. He reposed perfect 
trust in the wisdom of the order of nature, and in life or 
death submitted himself to her hands. Seeing in himself 
only an atom of the immeasurable whole; one individual in 
a countless swarm, he would not thrust forward his per- 
sonality, but would employ his last short hour in present- 
ing a great principle, which he hoped would prove 
beneficial to the coming time. 

Thus what passes under the name of religious instruction 
is narrow and selfish to the last degree. It has of itself no 
broad and expanding principles, and if the devotee 
becomes ennobled and enlarged, the power either comes 
from himself or some other source. By aiming one fatal 
blow at reason, it would transform the man into a blind 
slave, quaking with servile fear of the gory hag Supers- 
tition, and a ready tool of bigotry. 

Religious instruction is characterized by this singular 
quality, the more one is instructed the less one knows. 
Intellectual and moral culture are alone able to elevate the 
soul to the grand highlands of philosophy where, wholly 
above the accidents of the hour, it calmly contemplates 
the eternal relations of things. 

Infinitely better than this puling cant and unmanly 
sneaking from obligations taken and faults committed, 
the stoicism of pagan Rome, an Horatius offering himself 
for his country, a Regulus returning to torture because he 
had pledged his word, a magnanimity which sank self 



INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY OX LEARNING. 9! 

entirely out of sight, as in the consul Lucius iEmilius, 
who desperately wounded, after the battle of Cannse, cried, 
"Waste not your commiseration on me, but fly to Rome, 
and garrison her walls. . . Let me die in the midst of 
my slaghtered soldiers I" 

It is claimed by the leaders of Christianity that to it we 
owe our civilization — without it we should still roam the 
forests of Europe, skin -clad savages, without the least 
conception of right or wrong. To the general views 
expressed in the preceding pages we specialize to show the 
real influence Christianity exercised on the progress of 
European civilization. 

Although it may not be said that Christianity is respon- 
sible for the night of ignorance in which Europe wandered 
for over a thousand years, yet, if not the sole cause, it was 
the chief and most active agent in the production of that 
awful catastrophe ; and the prejudice then instilled against 
learning by ecclesiasticism has Rot yet wholly disappeared. 
Even in the Reformation which originated in the increase 
of intelligence, a fanatical crusade against learning was 
undertaken. Sage professors sent their pupils home with 
the assurance that, the Spirit of God would inspire the 
true believer. 

The first century was the flood-tide of Roman intellectual 
greatness — the age of inimitable poetry, perfected history, 
and diligent love o f philosophy. Probably at no period in the 
history of the ancient world did the masses enjoy in a higher 
degree the comforts of life. The refinement of the few 
reached to the many, and the love of knowledge was not a 
monopoly of a select circle. The age immediately follow- 
ing yielded historians, lawyers, and philosophers, who 
would have been illustrious in any period, and learning 
became so generally diffused that there were a greater 
number of cultivated minds than even in the Golden Era. 

The third century presents a different picture. Learning 
everywhere despised, history degraded to lying chronicles, 



92 CATCEEK OF HELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

poetry and philosophy contemptible, and the Latin tongue 
corrupted into a barbarous jargon. The laws of Constan- 
tine and succeeding emperors in the next century could 
not stay the tide of ignorance. Great men are evolved by 
the progress of events, not created by laws. 

Why this rapid decline from the pinnacle of greatness, 
in two centuries, to the abyss of ignorance ? Not the inun- 
dation of Northern hordes so much as the religion intro- 
duced into the Roman world during those centuries. The 
early Christians stigmatized learning as profane, and so 
identified was ancient literature with the old form of wor- 
ship that it was held in abhorrence by the fanatical devo- 
tees of tbe Nazarene. In 398 the Council of Carthage 
forbade its being read by bishops, and the ignorant masses 
were prevented from incurring the sin by inability. All 
physical sciences were held as impious and inconsistent 
with revelation. 

So long as the Christians were an insignificant sect, the 
influence of their contempt for literature and learning had 
little effect; but when they gained power and controlled 
the Government, their influence was exceedingly great. 
The offices of instructors of the Imperial family and of the 
sons of distinguished men in the nation, previously held by 
noble philosophers, were consigned to ignorant and super- 
stitious priests. The knowledge of the Pagan world was 
discarded, and the dogmas of theology supplied their place. 
The Church absorbed all the mental activity of the 
times. Philosophy, poetry, and profane history were dis- 
carded as unworthy the attention of regenerated mortals. 
A new arena was opened for intellectual contest — one 
which engaged the thought of the centuries. This was 
polemics; the solution of incomprehensible dogmas by 
never-ending verbal warfare. 

As science expands the faculties and ennobles the life, so 
such disputations narrow the mind, dwarf its powers, and 
make it imbecile. These studies of questions which are 



A THOUSAND YEARS OF MENTAL DABKNESS. 93 

merely artificial formulas having no existence except in 
imagination, corrupt irretrievably the fountains of knowl- 
edge. While the supporters of conflicting creeds, dogmas, 
and vagaries disputed, the Latin tongue became so cor- 
rupted that the record of ancient knowledge was sealed 
except to the learned. With the temples ruthlessly 
destroyed by those who considered them profane, perished 
the Old Empire of Thought. The heated disputants over 
vacuities furnished instead their interminable discissions, 
which, by preoccupying the attention of those who cared 
to think, excluded the old literature; ignorance became 
canonized. !No adequate conception can be formed of the 
darkness of the human intellect at this period. Superstition 
grew like a rank and pestilent weed, and asceticism de- 
pressed the understanding to stilllower depths. The Old was 
cast aside, and the literature given instead was valueless. 
Even the minds of thinkers were led astray along paths begin- 
ning in ignorance and ending nowhere. Worthless, except 
as a curiosity, is the literature succeeding the age of inspi- 
ration, when bishops sat in solemn council over such vast 
problems as the immaculate conception, the manner of the 
operation of Christ's will, the digestion of communion 
bread and wine, and the possession of property by Christ. 
When the Barbarians overspread the empire, they were 
plastic as children in the hands of the priests, and were 
easily persuaded to substitute the Mother of God and 
Christ for their peculiar deities. The New Eeligion held 
high carnival. Ignorance is the primeval slime out of 
which infallible authority grows sleek and powerful. The 
Christian hierarchy grew from century to century, grasp- 
ing power by every possible means, staying its hanxl at no 
crime, pausing at no cruelty, until it seemed that .Europe 
must inevitably become a theocracy like that of ancient 
Egypt, or of the Druids. From commutation, or pay- 
ment for pardons, from tithes, from share of intestate 
estates, from legacies, the Church at one time owned the 



94 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

title deeds of a greater portion of the lands of Europe; 
kings aDd emperors bowed unclad in the porch of the 
palace of the Popes, who ruled with undisputed despotism 
over the spiritual domain, and sought in the same manner 
to seize temporal affairs. 

Out of this night Europe emerged. How ? By the influ- 
ence of Christianity ? Who, after reviewing this dismal 
record of crime against humanity, dare assert that the 
knowledge by which Europe is blessed to-day, -and by 
which she is superior to the hordes of her ancient forests, 
flowed from Christianity ? If the Christian religion is so 
productive of advancement, why did it not put forth its 
fruits during the thousand years it held mankind in implicit 
obedience, and its nod was more potent than the laws of 
emperors ? 

Did it foster learning ? Countless martyrs at the stake 
and on the rack, whose only crime was extending human 
knowledge beyond prescribed limits, cry to the pitying 
Heavens. For a thousand years it sat on the prostrate 
form of a great civilization, and attempted to guide the 
course of events. What were the results ? Read the chron- 
icles of the Dark Ages. With blanched face and trembling 
nerves call up its scenes of fiendishness, where the repre- 
sentatives of this religion, clad with their power by God, 
wrought the work of fiends incarnate. The morality of 
Europe sank below that of the Empire even under Nero 
and Caligula. Morality, manly self-reliance, and nobility 
of character disappeared as the new religion gained ascen- 
dancy. We now witness its blasting effects on Spain, a 
fossil of the Dark Ages, where the priest is more powerful 
than the king he faithfully supports. The poison of 
unquestioning faith entered deep into the vital current of 
Spanish life and paralyzed the intellect. It is the same 
faith that supports the Hapsburgs, like evil birds preying 
on the people, who detest, but dare not move for fear of 
the terrible power unscrupulously exercised by the priest- 



THE DUPLICITY OF THE CHURCH. 95 

hood. Napoleon held h is throne, and Louis — his villianous 
shadow — kept his position on the slack rope of French 
politics by the same aid. Italy — fairest land on "which the 
sun ever shone — became the stronghold of the hydra — a 
nation of brigands and beggars. The cowled monk and 
driveling priest are the types of Church perfection. 

Who wishes the hierarchy could have succeeded as they 
hoped, and made the holy faith, descended from the Apos- 
tles, and sealed by the blood of martyrs, the triumphant 
ruler of Europe ? When we lead the history of its usur- 
pations, its unspeakable crimes, its love of torture, its 
fiendish cruelty, are we not unspeakably thankful it did 
not succeed ? 

The hierarchy fought against a self-reliant people, and 
the fortune of events was against them. The Crusades not 
only exposed the fallibility and duplicity of the Church, 
but foreign contact enlarged the intellectual horizon of 
Europe. The introduction of the long-buried classics 
through Arabic channels stimulated the ever-present desire 
for knowledge. Aristotle, a thousand years forgotten, 
became the leader in science, and the new civilization began 
at the identical point where research in accurate knowl- 
edge closed with the ancient philosophers. Humanity had 
passed a long night of pain, to find its efforts the incubus 
of nightmare, and to resume where, thirty generations 
before, it surrendered the burden. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE GREAT THEOLOGICAL FROBLEMS-THE ORIGIN 

OF EVIL, 1HE NATURE OF GOD, AND 

THE FUTURE STATE. 

THE ORIGIN OF EYIL. 

'Tis not for lack of goodness, man, 

The flames of hell are lit; 
Hear a whole world's experience 

Proclaim—" ' Tis lack of wit." 

Ah ! sighing over empires wrecked, 
And mighty nations cowled in gioom? 

Error is mortal and must die, 
But Progress rises from its tomb. 

Emma Tuttle. 

There is a tendency of the human mind to accept its 
ignorance of a subject as involving a problem, and after 
research has shown that what it mistook for profundity was 
only vacuity, the devotee holds to his opinion with a tenac- 
ity inversely proportioned to the nothingness of its cause. 
At one time Astrology was believed to present problems 
the solution of which would unravel the grand enigma of 
the stars in their relation to man. In another age the Phi- 
losopher's Stone and Fountain of Youth were as eagerly 
sought, We now know that Astrology, the Philosopher's 
Stone, the Fountain of Youth, were not problems but 
chimeras. In like manner, moral problems have been 
imagined, and the welfare of man, not only in this life 



THE EXISTENCE OF EVIL. 97 

but in the future, made to depend on their solution. 
These imaginary problems have probably engaged more 
attention and discussion than those which have a reality. 

Of these, the origin of good and evil, redemption, pre- 
destination, free-will, and the existence of Satan are exam- 
ples, each having called forth the keenest thought, and 
many having served as controversy for ages, yet all actu- 
ally being names standing for nothing. 

Of these, none have received more attention than the 
existence of evil. Out of it have grown the overshadowing 
systems of theology, and the wonderful cosmogonies — 
childish dreams of infantile man — to account for the phe- 
nomena of Nature. 

Man is placed in a beautiful world, where the grand and 
inspiring scenes of land and ocean, boundless forests and 
plains, the stormy grandeur of the sea, the dreary expanse 
of the prairie, constantly excite activity of thought and 
profoundest emotions. Nature with bountiful hand spreads 
happiness and enjoyment on every side. Man plants the 
grape, the corn, and olive, and genial showers and sunshine 
mature the harvest. Nature works expressly for him. The 
uncultured savage is impressed with the presence of a good 
Deity who governs for the express purpose of bestowing 
happiness on his children. He is met, however, by coun- 
ter-phenomena, which it seems impossible to refer to a 
good being. The sunshine and shower, the abundant 
harvest, the exhilaration of health are mingled with the 
rush of storm, with swift lightnings and terrible thunders, 
prostrating in a moment the labors of centuries of repose, 
the parching drought withering and destroying the efforts 
of man; pestilence dark and fearful, and famine preying 
on friend and foe. There is an antagonism which cannot 
be referred to one source. There must exist an inferior or 
equal power delighting in subverting the designs of the 
good and benevolent one. 
This belief is not of a tribe or race, but is common to all 



9S CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

at a given stage of advancement. It is not a question of 
time, but of development. Although widely differing in 
the trappings which surround them, there is slight differ- 
ence in the countless myths of the world. Viewing Nature 
through his animality, the savage beholds a reflection of 
himself, and, unbiased by his geographical position or 
age, has arrived at similar conclusions. He is constantly 
impressed with this antagonism. Storm and zephyr, sun- 
shine and cloud, health and disease, life and death, speak 
in unmistakable language, and as fear is stronger than 
love, the God of Evil receives by far the greater homage, 
He views with apathy the blessings poured forth by the 
Good Deity, but becomes frantic wirh fear and servilely 
prostrates himself in the dust at the approach of the Evil. 
Days of sunshine, bounteous harvests, years of health, are 
effaced by an hour of storm, the failure of a season, or a 
moment of pain. 

Evil is imperfection. We are not to inquire why an all- 
wise, omnipotent Creator did not create perfectly in the 
beginning; we must accept the fact. Our improvements 
acknowledge Nature's imperfections. We would destroy 
noxious weeds, venomous reptiles, and insects, thereby 
lessening our toil and ensuring the harvest; we would abol* 
ish whirlwinds and earthquakes, equalize climates, demol- 
ish mountains, fill up rugged places, and drain marshes and 
lakes. Such to us are physical evils; to other children of 
Nature they are not. She loves the reptile of the slime as 
well a3 the eagle of the crag, and is equally atten tive to 
their wants. She will perfect herself in due season, imper- 
ceptibly, without convulsion or revolution, while man 
must suffer the pains of his imperfect surroundings and 
organization. Out of this imperfection grew the evils of 
individual action. The savage, barely able to fashion a 
bow and spear, as little feels the impress of a higher law as 
the lion or tiger, and as well might we say to the latter, 
as it leaps on its victim, " Cease; it is wrong. " Both act 



VARIOUS CONCEPTIONS OP EVIL. 99 

in accordance with their organization. It is just and hon- 
orable for the New Zealander to refresh himself at his can- 
nibal repast according to his standard. The pac ions being 
first developed and unguided, there is, previous to the 
growth of the intellect, a period of great excess. This is 
overcome by growth, and, one by one, errors none the less 
necessary for being false are discarded. The mind matures 
as the limb3 of an infant are enabled to walk. Progress is 
the evolution of inherent qualities. It is not derived from 
revelation or any foreign source. To understand a*revela- 
tion there must be answering faculties in man's mind, else 
it would be unintelligible. A revelation of morals to a 
totally depraved being would be in an unknown tongue. 
Man is organically moral, else he could not have a moral 
idea; and, possessing innate moral capacities, he has no 
need of a revelation. 

The first conception of evil originated in an imperfect 
knowledge of Nature, and the personification of this im- 
perfect knowledge is the God of Evil. 

The attainments of a later age, by indicating its origin, 
demolish the dogma. If the Good Deity is infinite in 
benevolence and power, and created everything as pleased 
him, he could not have created evil. Then, if evil exists, 
it must be self-existent — a supposition conflicting with the 
infiniteness of the Good Deity. 

Evil is the friction of Nature's activities working for 
eternal good. 

As man advances, he is torn less and less by the thorns 
against which he is thrust by ignorance, and we realize 
that the only divine life is that wherein he comprehends 
Nature and gladly does her bidding. 

Evil can only be overcome by growth. 



100 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 



THE NATURE OF GOD. 

Each nation believes that its own laws are by far the most 
excellent. No one, therefore, but a madman would treat such 
prejudices with contempt.— Hebodotus. 

The rise and growth of the God-idea has been considered 
in those chapters treating the subject historically. From 
the All-God to the One God who rules all is a long and 
painful journey. The idea was conceived in a false under- 
standing of natural phenomena, and its progress is the 
application of increasing knowledge. Monotheism, simply 
substituting one God in place of many, is scarcely removed 
from Polytheism. Its great advance is made when it 
shakes off its personality and believes God to be a spirit- 
ual essence. 

The protean forms which the idea and conception of God 
have assumed should teach the falsity of the theory that 
God is revealed to the intuitions. Xerophanes saw the 
error of supposing man's conception of God a proof of his 
existence or character. He said, "If horses or lions had 
hands and should make their deities, they would respect- 
ively make a horse and a lion." English theological 
writers have rarely ventured to attempt the proof of the 
existence of God by philosophical argument. Kant has 
shown their insufficiency. The stronghold is in intuition. 
The reason acknowledges God's existence. But what 
becomes of this supposition when it is found that whole 
nations have no idea of God, and when some of the most 
enlightened men fail to feel his existence ? Monotheism 
is not the end of the series, but it reduces the gods to one. 
What is his nature ? 

He is self-existent. 

It is said, in argument of the existence of God, that we 
cannot conceive of creation, with all its designs and adap- 
tations, without a planner^ a creator; at the same titpe it U 



IDEAS OF GOD. 101 

asserted that we can conceive of the self-existence of the 
designer ! Great is the mind that cannot comprehend the 
lesser but is amply able to grasp the greater ! He is 
of infinite power, wisdom, and love. Are these spiritual 
abstractions, or are they personified? Necessarily the latter, 
and every man's conception must be different, as the god 
of the lion would be a perfect lion. What logically fol- 
lows ? That a3 our ideas of God are projections of our- 
selves, there can be no certain and irue idea of the Divine. 
We may build an ideal of what God must be, analyzed to 
his elements. He must be infinite causation, as the cause 
of all; he must be the controlling mind, yet he cannot 
reason, for that would imply imperfect consciousness; he 
cannot be said to foresee, for that implies relations as to 
time; he cannot be said to have judgment, fancy, compar- 
ison, qualities of the finite mind. The primary elements 
left, by analogies, are being, cause, knowledge, love— each 
of infinite degree. 

Can personality be formed from these ? Can they be 
infinite in a personal being ? Well did the learned and 
pious Dr. Arnold say: " It is only of God in Christ that I 
can, in my present state of being, conceive anything at all." 
The abstract God is the Father; the personified God is 
Christ. The Trinity supplies both the metaphysician and 
the most sensual mind. 

God must be infinite. Man, being finite, can form no 
conception or idea of him whatever. This is an unavoid- 
able logical conclusion, from the necessity of man's con- 
stitution. 

But, it is claimed, we cannot understand Nature or our- 
selves — not even the growth of the humblest flower; shall 
we therefore cease investigation ? The fields of thought 
thus compared are totally unlike. With matter we deal 
with finiteness, and pause on the threshold of infinite gen- 
eralizations. With God there are no finite qualities to 
seize hold of ; his very being and constitution of mind 



102 CAREER OP RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

are different from ours, and to us his thoughts cannot be 
translated. 

As children strive to clutch the moon, philosophers and 
metaphysical theologians have endeavored to grasp the 
infinite. They have failed because attempting the impos- 
sible. The world is little batter for all their dogmatical 
speculations. They are only mental gymnasts, and per-* 
form no productive labor. 

It is claimed that belief in God is the foundation of all 
religion. This is true of religion considered as the ceremo- 
nial growing out of a belief that God demands respect and 
reverence from man, but not true of morality. Men have 
believed in all varieties of gods, or renounced all gods, and 
yet lived honest, upright, and noble lives. The solution 
of this vexed problem has no relation to morality, being 
only interesting to religious schemers, who of course must 
have a God to carry them forward. While the best of men 
have held diametrically opposed ideas of a God, or placed 
such ideas with the indeterminable, the worst and most 
fiendish of mankind have claimed to understand God 
perfectly, and have waded in human gore to vindicate their 
opinions, often sealing their faith by terrible forms of 
martyrdom. 

Let Theology bury its myriad dead, whose bones whiten 
the plains of the Old World; wait till the pitying showers 
of heaven wash away the stains of blood, the fagot ceases 
to smoke, the tears of widows and mothers and helpless 
children be dried, and a great race of people rise from the 
dust in which with iron heel it has crushed their spirits, 
ere it call its worship the religion of love and peace sent 
to redeem mankind. 

Science will go her quiet way, of God neither affirming 
nor denying. Her only office is to point out errors where 
they occur. All that the past has furnished in proof of 
the existence of a Divine Architect she pronounces as the 
assumption of children grasping at the moon. The vexed 



EAKLY IDEAS OF IMMORTALITY. 108 

so-called problem is not a problem; it is a chimera. She 
goes forward from facts to the order of facts called law, on 
to the organization of matter. Here the human mind 
stands on the threshold^of an unknown universe into which 
it can go, which it will conquer and claim, only to find, as 
the intellect grows acute, new domains extending beyond. 
As we pass from matter to law, from law to principle, 
from principle to attribute far beyond the outermost skirts 
of space, we may tread the sanctuary of the Supreme 
Being. What is his nature ? Is he personal ? Is he an 
omnipotent spirit ? Vain questions ! When the intellect 
enters the sanctuary, all shall be made plain. Until then 
it must calmly wait, content with investigations it can 
comprehend. The theologians, who fail even to under- 
stand the organization of finite man, and scoff with priestly 
sneer at the words of accurate knowledge, untrammeled by 
facts may vault on the wings of discordant fancy, and 
between the tilts they give each other in religious tourna- 
ment enlighten the laity as to the being of an Infinite God. 
When they agree among themselves and produce their 
facts, Science will readily receive their conclusions. 
Until that time their beliefs must remain "Inadmissible 
hypotheses. 

THE FUTURE STATE. 

Do right; act justly; love your race; then you will safely 
close your eyes in sleep when age has settled on your earthly 
form. No shadow will darken your soul, but peacefully will 
the internal unfold itself, and you will awake in heaven an 
angel of light,— The Sage. 

But my mind— by I know not what secret impulse— was ever 
raising its views into future ages, strongly persuaded that I 
should then only begin to live when I ceased to exist in the 
present world. Indeed, if the soul were not naturally immortal 
never, surely, would the desire for immortal glory be a passio n. 
which always exerts itself with the greatest force in the noblest 
and most exalted bosoms.— Ciceko. 



104 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

A Belief in the immortal existence is perhaps more uni- 
versal than that in the existence of the gods. There are 
tribes of men too low to entertain it, but it seems that no 
high state of advancement is requisite for its rudest form. 
It is from its lowest to its most perfect state a reflection of 
the intellectual status of its recipient. The savage passes 
to a land where the chase is successful, a country stocked 
with game. They place in the grave of the dead warrior 
his bow and arrow and provisions for his lonely jojirney. 
All go to one place. As man advances, orders of merit are 
recognized; the good are separated from the bad; either 
directly or through mediators, the gods pass judgment on 
mortals. 

The doctrine in Hindostan and Egypt early attained 
a complex expression. The spirit, although immortal and 
descending from eternity, became involved in the vortex 
of metempsychosis, and was compelled to follow a weary 
round of being. The belief has descended to the present in 
the petrified theology of Hindostan. The visible body 
contains a subtle invisible body, to which the faculties are 
assigned. This spiritual body is not cast off at death, but 
accompanies the soul in its transmigration, until it is left, 
at the beatific absorption into the bosom of Brahm; then it 
returns, and is again clothed with a physical body, the form 
of which depends on the character of the soul that last in 
habited it. 

This expression of the doctrine has been more widely 
received than any other. It was early transferred to 
Greece, and appears in the songs of her bards and the spec- 
ulations of her philosophers. Greece always had her scep- 
tics, but immortality was defended by her best minds. Her 
philosophers built up metaphysical arguments with similar 
tact and acumen to that manifested by metaphysical theo- 
logians of to-day, and equally well succeeded in asking 
more questions than they answered. Her poets dreamed of 
Elysian fields, and her people received their fancies with 



THE FUTURE STATE. 105* 

the same relish they did the lucubrations of her sages. 
When there are no facts to guide the vaulting imagination, 
there is no predicting whither it will take its erratic course. 
The doctrine as prepared by the Grecians was received b} r 
the Romans. 

The priests early seized the doctrine, and forged out of 
it chains for the spirit. It gave them not only power over 
the body, but also enabled them to blast the immortal 
being, It would be inferred that the chosen people of God 
from the beginning had a clear and perfect conception of 
immortal life. As a cardinal doctrine of religion and 
incentive to morality they should have understood its ele- 
ments, and their sacred books definitely expressed it. 
These books indicate their human origin by their conflict- 
ing statements of this important subject, at times showing 
that the writers had a dim idea of futurity, and at others 
positively denying it. The early writers placed the seat of 
the soul in the blood, the breath, the heart, and the bowels. 
Their ideas were fluctuating and indefinite. The future 
state was a dark, joyless, conscious state, like the shadow- 
land of the Greek poets. The prophets could be evoked 
by witches; and favorites of the gods, like Enoch and 
Elijah, were miraculously translated. Again, the doctrine 
is positively denied in the Sacred Word. " As the waters 
fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up, so 
man lieth down and riseth not." &c. " For there is no 
work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave 
whither thou goest." " For that which befalleth the sons 
of men befalleth the beasts. ... As the one dieth, so 
dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath." 

During the exile, the Jews imbibed from the religion of 
Zoroaster a more complete idea of immortality. Hence- 
forth the sacred writers speak more definitely, and in Mac- 
cabees a moral application is made. It is used as an incen- 
tive. The righteous are to be happy, the sinful miserable, 
in the next life. At the advent of Jesus we find three 



106 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

phases of the belief entertained by three distinct seets. 
The Pharisees maintained the resurrection of the body — 
an idea older than the Egyptian Pyramids. A divergent 
portion received also the doctrine of transmigration, and 
must have entertained the companion belief of pre-exist- 
ence. The Essenes believed in a future state, where the 
actions of this life would be rewarded or punished, but dis- 
carded the corporeal resurrection. The Sadducees were 
doubters, and entirely discarded the doctrine. Such was 
the influence of revelation on those for whom it was "espe- 
cially designed. 

The advance of the idea of a future state as a reflection of 
the receiving mind kept pace with intellectual growth. It 
has been discarded by many great thinkers, and received 
by other minds equally great, and it would seem that the 
abilities of metaphysics have been exhausted in the argu- 
ments on either side. 

The New Testament, as well as the Old, leaves the sub- 
ject of the form, of future existence indeterminate. From 
them certain sects claim the resurrection of the body and 
its reinhabiting the earth; others the reverse. Some claim 
the eternal death of the wicked; others their eternal 
torture. 

The belief has been used to terrible account by the priest 
hood. The ghastly theology of Christianity turns on im 
mortality. Hell and its fearful despot are the stock-in- 
trade of the Protestant, and praying souls out of purgatory 
the lucrative business of the Catholic priesthood. 

Man having fallen, and thereby committed an infinite 
sin, must be saved. This theology does not trouble itself 
about this life, but is vitally concerned with the next. 
Earthly life is too brief for it to carry out its diabolic 
schemes of endless torture. Eternal life must be admitted 
for that purpose. It breaks the continuity of existence at 
death; what is good for this life may be damnation for the 
next; overrides all laws, and howls the doom of myriads 



IMMORTALITY A PART OF NATURE'S PLAN. 10? 

damned. It is cot surprising that culture, disgusted with, 
such barbarous doctrines, should revolt against them and 
support absolute materialism, finding in that system the 
true basis of morality and happiness. 

Metempsychosis does not meet the scientific demands of 
an immortal existence. It involves the birth and existence 
of every living being in direct interference of a personal 
God, a perpetual miracle. If the spirit clothes itself with 
flesh through embryonic growth, then it follows that gen- 
eration itself is only another name for this process, and 
could not exist without a spirit ready to be incarnated. 
The science of life in such case would become valueless and 
visionary. While every fact of science opposes this theory, 
it has not a single evidence of its own to bring in support. 
The vague sense of double existence, or a preceding state, 
to which is given so much weight, is fully explained by the 
well-determined duality of the brain, both hemispheres 
normally receivingthe same impression at the same instant, 
and thus combining them as one, as the double organs of 
seeing and hearing convert two waves or two images into 
one. But abnormally one hemisphere acts slower than the 
other. An indeterminate interval of time intervenes be- 
tween the two actions, and one is projected into the past, 
confounded with things remembered. The theory is op 
posed to science, as it breaks the continuity of evolution, 
and substitutes miracle for law. 

As sure as creation is pervaded by a fixed and determin- 
ate plan, is it certain that man's future life, whatever its 
form may be, constitutes a part of that plan. When we 
survey the realm of causation this unity cannot escape us. 
All causes and all effects tend in one direction, like the 
irresistible set of a great current. The evolution of organic 
life out of the primeval slime, its progress through succes- 
sive types, ascending step by step the ladder of existence, 
through molluscs, fishes, reptiles, and mammals, to man, 
indicate terms in the series of advance. Is man the last 



108 CAREER OP RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

term? Shall causation, having reached its limit in him, go 
no further, or expend itself in making him more and more 
perfect? Then, to our finite reason, Nature is a failure. 
The perfection of physical form was reached years ago, and 
advance has been diverted into the new channels of moral, 
intellectual, and spiritual life. Only in this direction is 
unlimited progress possible. Man's immortality thus be- 
comes a part of Nature's plan— the great end and aim of 
creative energy: not a foreign element introduced at death, 
nor a supernatural state, but an evolution from physical 
existence, and amenable to determinate laws. 

The future state thus considered is no longer a part of 
theology, but a portion of knowledge, and its religious and 
moral bearing is radically changed. What its superstitious 
inculcation yields has already been noticed. It often has a 
beautiful effect on the life, but more often * in the past 
became a terrible engine of misery and degradation as it 
was manipulated by craft and unflinching selfishness. 
When made a part of accurate knowledge, stripped of 
supernaturalism, held to the rule of law, reduced to the 
province of science, and viewed with calm reason, immor- 
tality becomes the crowning desire and blessing of human 
life. Under its best phase, as a religious institution, the 
future of the righteous was a curse; and Prometheus bound 
to the rock, with insatiate vultures tearing his vitals, is an 
appropriate symbol of man forced to accept an immortal- 
ity of despairing misery or passive inactivity. Ennobled 
as the goal of physical causation, emerging from the slime 
of superstition, taking rank with sister sciences, the future 
life, with its lofty ideality, reacts with irresistible force on 
the earthly existence. 



CHAPTER IX. 

MAN'S FALL, AND THE CHRISTIAN SCHEME FOR HIS 
REDEMPTION 

As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive.— Bible. 
There is but one religion, and it can never die.— Theodoee 
Paekee. 

Theology makes the fundamental assertion that Adam 
was created directly by God, pronounced perfect, and 
placed in a perfect world. He had the choice of good and 
evil, choosing the latter, alienated not only himself but the 
whole human race from God, corrupted absolutely and 
irretrievably the fountain of morality, and metamorphosed 
mankind into the offspring of the Devil, corrupt from the 
crown of their heads to the soles of their feet. " Ever since 
the fall of Adam, age has shaken the tree of human life, 
and the Devil has gathered the fruit into hell." 

Man insulted the Infinite by his own free choice, and his 
punishment is endless death. God's eternal justice knows 
no mercy; and hence man must suffer the anguish and tor- 
ture of fire, the gnawing tooth of the undying worm of 
for ever and ever. 

This terrible view of the origin of sin and its portentous 
consequences, conjured out of the gloomy depths of a dis- 
eased and morbid imagination, requires an equally tremen- 
dous myth for the redemption of man, the fallen god, the 
incarnate devil. He of himself is powerless. Utterly, 
hopelessly depraved, he must rely on the atoning power of 
something outside of himself for salvation. 



110 CAUEER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

Creation had proved a gigantic failure. The highest 
effort of creative energy was an abortion; and the ultimate 
spirit for whom all this labor had been expended, instead 
of rising to the light of God, rushed madly into darkness, 
and became a slave to Satan, his enemy. Logically, it may 
be difficult to account for a perfect man in a perfect world 
overruled by an omnipotent an£ infinite God falling into 
sin, but theology passes this abyss on the bridge of mys- 
tery. 

Man, having fallen, must be saved. The Infinite" God 
had performed his best work, and failed. There was no 
alternative in this unique spiritual cosmogony but for God 
to sacrfice himself. An infinite sin had been committed, 
and an infinite sacrifice only could atone for it. The death 
and never-ending pain of myriads of men would be as a 
drop to the ocean of punishment required. God as the only 
Infinite Being, must suffer. 

Placing the doctrine of metempsychosis and the Hebrew 
idea of the efficacy of animal sacrifices together, both 
ardently supported by the Pagan world thousands of years 
before Christ, the ready reception of the divine incarna- 
tion of Christ can be understood. The Infinite Spirit de- 
scended, and in the person of Christ, by martyrdom, paid 
the infinite debt. The ledger of Heaven by this act was 
balanced, and an infinite sum carried over to the credit 
side. "The blood of Christ," says Jerome, " quenched 
the flaming sword at the entrance of Paradise. ,, The 
countless millions of spirits confined in the terrible under- 
world, or Hades, were released, and the heavens were 
white with the glitter of their ascending wings. Christ 
died for us; to him we look for salvation, and if we believe 
in him, even at the last hour, we are safe. The divinity 
of Christ reflects on his mother, and it is to be hoped that 
the idea of incarnation will extend to every child, that they 
may be regarded as incarnations of Divinity— miraculous 
conceptions, to mature into perfection. 



CHRISTIAN VIEWS OF SALVATION. Ill 

In this scheme there is no choice. " Whatever is not a 
duty is a sin." A blind obedience is the only praiseworthy 
passion of human nature, which is so absolutely corrupt 
that there is no hope for anyoae until he is sure it is dead 
within him. We can do nothing without sinning; but 
the more we surrender ourselves to God, the less sin we 
commit. Dreary doctrines; how they distort the soul! 
And yet how many think the dwarfed, starved, and 
pinched specimens treated by this system models of Chris- 
tian virtue! So are there admirers of the distorted ever- 
greens, trained into the forms of pyramids and animals 
which disfigure many a lawn, who think them more beau- 
tiful than the trees of the forest. The elasticity of the tree 
can be subdued; it becomes so gnarled it ceases to exist. 
So the mind can be cramped and stinted until it ceases to 
rebel; but this is a terrible condition — an imposition and 
a sham. 

These ideas give tone and direction to Christianity. They 
make it a system to be endured, not of development. It 
is fitly represented as a grievous cross, and Bunyan's "Pil- 
grim's Progress " is the most popular, because the most 
correct, picture of Christian life. 

If the idea of atonement for sin through the sufferings of 
another were not so generally received, its refutation might 
be considered a gratuitous task. Really no belief is so 
abiding, none more zealously held. Beliefs once thorough- 
ly impressed are well-nigh indelible. The young mind 
finds a system ready-made, which it is taught to revere, to 
receive unquestioningly, and which becomes a shell, hard, 
indurated, impenetrable, from which it is difficult to escape, 
and in which it is comfortable to reside. Selfishness is 
strongly enlisted. We throw our transgressions on the 
shoulders of another, and are saved by faith. The incen- 
tives are of the basest — hope of gain and fear of suffering. 
Heaven is held out by the Infinite Father as a sugar-plum, 
and hell yawns to frighten! A strange moral government 



113 



CAREER 0# RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 



of the world! Can the Church advance out of it? Man* 
kind assuredly can and will, but the Church cannot, for as 
soon as it does its character is wholly changed. There is 
no need of a church except to save man in this manner. 
And man's salvation in this manner is of doubtful benefit. 
The pages of heathen records present no scheme for more 
immoral tendency than vicarious atonement. Let the ex- 
ample of the great Constantine illustrate. To none does 
the Church turn with greater reverence. He was ordained 
to lead her to victory over the allied powers of the Pagan 
world. To him was presented the -miraculous sign of the 
cross above the noonday sun inscribed with these words: 
In Hoc Signo Vinces — "By this sign shalt thou conquer/' — 
and to him on the following night Christ himself appeared 
with the same emblem and told him to inscribe it on his ban- 
ners. By the Greek he is worshiped as a saint and called 
equal to the apostles. 

Such is the glass given by the historians of a victorious 
party, but history truthfully recorded things in quite another 
light over the character of the imperial saint. The death 
of Maximian may be excused by the custom of tyrants, and 
perhaps the betrayal of the trust of Licinius, his vanquished 
brother-in-law, may be passed over in the same manner, 
cruel and dastardly though it may be, but the apologis 
must stand aghast over the inhuman murder of Crispus, 
his first son, whose only crime was too great a popularity 
gained in defense of his country. He presents the specta- 
cle of a father stimulating informers against his own son, 
because that son was a worthy representative of Roman 
manhood at its best estate; a father listening, counte- 
nancing and seizing the opportunity there to assasinate his 
own offspring. From this frightful tragedy he ran swiftly 
to other scenes of unmentionable carnage and lust. After 
a conjugal union of tweoty years he condemned his second 
wife, Fausta, to be suffocated in a hot bath, which had been 
extraordinarily heated. If so implacable with his nearest 



THE CRIMES OF COXSTAXTIXE. 113 

kin, that he should have raged like a ravenous beast among 
his friends is not a source of astonishment. He impris- 
oned his two nephews with the ultimate design of their 
assassination, a purpose which he accomplished on one, the 
other, Julian the Apostate, escaping afterwards to revive the 
old Roman religion, for a last and unsuccessful struggle 
against the new Christianity. He is styled the Apostate and 
shamefully vilified by the Church historians, though his 
austere life and transcendent virtues put to blush the char- 
acter of one and all of the early Fathers. Educated in pris- 
on, fleeing for his life, and seeing his relatives and friends 
struck down by the tyrant who represented the new relig- 
ion, he became disgusted at its cruelty and vindictiveness, 
and reverted to the grand faith and ceremonies of his an- 
cestors. 

The same year in which Constantine convened the coun- 
cil of Nice and sat on a low stool amidst the assembled 
bishops, c< listening with patience and speaking with mod- 
esty," he most atrociously murdered his innocent son. 
The Church for which he manifested so much reverence 
had a sovereign panacea for sin-sick souls. By receiving 
the sacrament of baptism, all sins were washed away. Yet 
the crafty tyrant postponed the ceremony to the last. He 
was the champion of the Church without entering into 
fullest communion. He purposely omitted this ceremony 
that he might, at the end of his bloody career, have full 
atonement granted. The Bishops for whom he sent in his 
last illness were deeply edified with his contrition when he 
at last received the rite of baptism, and was fully par- 
doned. 

Well has the great historian of Rome remarked: "Future 
tyrants were encouraged to believe that the innocent blood 
that they might shed would be instantly washed away in 
the waters of regeneration." 

If man never fell, if he is a progressive instead of a retro- 
gressive being, the stupendous scheme is an idle tale, and 



114 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS.* 

with it atonement, salvation, and numberless minor dog- 
mas become superfluous. Outside of theology or mythology 
there is no indication of man's fall. Science has not been 
consulted by bigoted votaries; her followers have pursued 
their thoughtful way, while the theologians have gone 
theirs. Theological speculation is the^easiest speculation, 
for it does not require facts, and if incapable of demon- 
stration, is equally invulnerable to refutation by those em- 
ploying the same weapons. It has been dimly seen -that 
science conflicts with the biblical myths of the creation, 
and although on one hand theology has sought to reconcile 
science with itself, the students of the latter have not made 
any such attempt, rather shrinking from the application of 
the facts which they well knew were in such irreconcilable 
opposition. Geology has proved the vast duration of the 
world, and more dexterous hands than have yet applied 
themselves to the work must gloss its revelations to make 
them apparently accord with the Bible. 

With the extension of the age of the Earth, the introduc- 
tion of man is carried into the Past. Beyond the indeter- 
minate period of tradition, the geologist finds an indisput- 
ably authentic volume written on tablets of rock by fossil 
remains. Adam, as the first man, becomes a myth. Before 
he is said to have been placed in the Garden of Eden, man 
had inhabited the earth for a vast period of time. That 
mystic era before the beginning of history, when man 
existed as the rudest savage, has been divided into the Iron, 
Bronze, and Stone Ages. Each of these periods represent 
a vast epoch. Man first used stone weapons; then he dis- 
covered bronze; and, lastly, iron. An age previous to, 
and lower than, stone weapons has been discovered. M. 
Boucher de Perthes divides the Stone Age into the ground 
and unground. He says : ( '~We have no knowledge of any 
•savages at present so low that they do not sharpen their 
weapons by attrition, but the lowest Stone Age presents us 
examples of this want of sharpening. The implements 



THE VAST ANTIQUITY OF MAN. H5 

found in the Post-tertiary, so far, are only chipped rudely 
into form; they are spear-heads, leaf -shaped instruments, 
flints chipped to an edge on one side and left unwrought on 
the other. When the Tasmanian wants an instrument for 
cutting wood, he takes a stone and breaks an edge, with 
which he at once proceeds to his work. Similar instru- 
ments are found in the drift. The instruments of the drift 
are less neatly formed by larger chippings than those of the 
Scandinavian shell heaps, or of America, Besides absence 
of grinding, the instruments are very rude, a character 
which gives them important bearing on the history of civil- 
ization." The men who used these weapons made by 
breaking stones to an accidental sharp edge dwelt in caves. 
Of them Yogt remarks: " The cave man was the rudest of 
savages. Perhaps there exists at present no race so low. 
His diet was exclusively flesh. No traces of vegetable food, 
nor even hooks or nets for capturing fish, have been found. 
He attacked his prey — like a wild animal — by cunning, 
speed, strength; and it seems that with his simple stone in- 
struments he mastered the young rhinoceros. He clothed 
himself with the skins of animals sewed together with 
sinews by means of needle-shaped bones. His dwelling 
was a nest or hut, perhaps little better than some anthro- 
poid apes construct. He had no domestic animals; and 
not until a later period did he domesticate the dog — the 
first animal he took under his protection." Such is a faith- 
ful picture of the European savage — the progenitor of the 
Anglo-Saxon. 

For the last fifty years facts have been constantly pro- 
duced in support of the vast antiquity of man ; but so strong 
has been theological prejudice that they have either been 
strenuously denied or ignored. Human fossils have been 
repeatedly found in such positions and state of preserva- 
tion that had they belonged to any other animal they would 
have been at once pronounced true fossils, but, belonging 
to man, they were at once cast aside as recent. Slowly and 



116 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

patiently scientists have labored and accumulated a mass 
of facts which now challenge refutation. In no province 
of investigation has prejudice mure absolutely suppressed 
facts or silenced reason. Theologians make no mention of 
the mass of evidence daily accumulating, presuming that 
science and theology have no relation. They will find in 
the end that this, like all other questions, must be fought 
on the ground of positive knowledge. The discoveries 
bearing on man have been condensed in another volume — 
" Origin and Antiquity of Man ;" and the present pages only 
allow of the general statement of their results. M. Boucher 
de Perthes, from calculations based on the growth of peat, 
makes the flint arrows found in the Valley of the Somme, 
in France, one hundred and twenty thousand years old, and 
yet to this vast duration must be added the indeterminable 
period allowed for the formation of the gravel-bed in which 
they are found. Human fossils are found in Sweden, at 
least (estimated by Lyell's data of two feet and a half of 
coast elevation in a century) twenty-seven thousand five 
hundred years old. 

The investigations of Linaut Bey in the Delta of Egypt 
give certain evidence that man was sufficiently civilized to 
fashion bricks and pottery forty-one thousand years before 
the building of the Pyramids. Beneath this civilized state — 
for man has already made a great advance when he acquires 
the art of making pottery— lies the savage, or Stone Age, 
when he posessed only stone arrows and spears, such as 
the Valley of the S)mme has preserved. He dwelt in the 
midst of a dense wilderness inhabited by colossal beasts, 
armed only with a rudely broken flint. For what length of 
time he had previously existed cannot be determined, but 
he had advanced from the rudest state by a process slow 
and painful. The more enlightened a people, the more 
rapid their advancement. Savage tribes remain from 
age to age apparently without change, so extremely 
slow is the awakening of their intellectual powers. 



DID MAN EVER FALL ? 117 

The period of time from the flint axe to that of bronze 
must be extremely long, and still more vast that 
which stretches into the night of time to the unarmed 
hairy savage—- the primeval man. All this vast duration 
lies far below the base of the hoary pyramids, which of 
themselves are scarcely of historic time, reaching back, 
according to Lepsius's calculations, to within one hundred 
and twelve years of the Creation according to received 
chronology.* 

From the brutal savage, through the interminable dura- 
tion of the ages of Stone and Bronze, man ad^nced into 
the uncertain light of tradition. Constantly developing his 
intellectual powers, he slowly and steadily ascended into 
civilization. Has he ever fallen? He has been too low to 
fall. Could the savage, all of whose genius was comprised 
in the art of breaking a stone to a sharp edge, and using it 
in offense or defense, fall? He could not well be more 
savage. But when we pass from the Bronze to the Iron 
Age, we reach the dawn of history, which, century after 
century, records the accumulation of thought in unbroken 
advancement. 

Ah, Garden of Eden! state of blissful perfection! you are 
myths — aspirations of the human heart retroverted into the 
past. 

* For the facts corroborating these statements seethe works 
of Lubbock, Steenstrup, Dr. Keller, Sir Charles Lyell, and the 
linguistic researches of Muller, 



CHAPTER X. 

MANS POSITION-FATE, FREE-WILL. FREE-AGENOY 
NECESSITY. RESPONSIBILITY. 

Morality is based on Anatomy and Physiology. 
An individual is the representative of all the conditions by 
which he is evolved. 
Fate is the personification of the constitution of things. 

Man is surrounded by gigantic, terrible forces, over 
which he has no control, and to avert which his efforts 
are as unavailing as those of the brutes. He is a child of 
the elements, an atom thrown up by their collision and 
concentration as a bubble arises on a stream by conflicting 
currents. He is more ; he is a bundle of elements which 
thus united become a centrestance, from which causes 
emanate as from the elements themselves. 

As the elements from which he springs are amenable to 
unvarying laws — the irrevocable mandate of fate— man, as 
the result of their union, must be a creature of fate or un- 
changing law. The anthropomorphic view of the Universe 
at once dissolves. The elements he seeks to control are 
masters. Man is a slave, chained, under their perpetual 
surveillance. 

Is this a truth ? Are we bound to the Achillean car, or 
are we free ? Seemingly we are free. We are gods, will- 
ing and doing in perfect freedom. Ah ! this freedom is a 
delusion — one of the wiles of our masters to cheat us into 
self-complacency. Not a leaf falls, not a hair of our heads 
whitens, but a myriad of ages ago it was written in the 
Book of Fate. Is a tree overturned by the wind ? It was 



MAN AND HIS CIRCUMSTANCES. 119 

known before a tree existed, and every acorn counted by the 
recording causes. Every leaf, every insect which feeds on 
the leaf, every drop of rain, of dew, every flake of snow 
which has or will fall on those leaves, was known before 
the earth was evolved from the abnormal ocean. 

The human being, physically and mentally matured, is 
the representative of every law and condition which has 
ever acted on him or his progenitors, ad infinitum,. In 
him the}' are not only individualized ; they are centrestan- 
tialized. He exists because of their action ; he is as they 
have made him. In this sense man is a creature of circum- 
stanccs. So far as these forces and conditions acted pre- 
vious to his birth, he is not a free agent, nor is he in his rela- 
tion to the fixed r.ction of the great forces of Nature. But 
on the circumstances which surround his maturity he acts 
by virtue of his inherent selfhood, the resultant of all pre- 
vious conditions which make up that selfhood. In this 
view he may be considered free ; for what we call a man is 
nothing more nor less than the aggregate of forces and con- 
ditions, many of which we understand, and many of which 
we do not understand. He is free, just as his organization, 
representative of all previous conditions and forces, will 
allow. This freedom is quite distinct from the dogmatical 
tenet of free-agency, inasmuch as it regards man's existence 
as an effect becoming a cause, and not a self-existent 
cause. 

Difference in the primordial or pre-natal conditions has 
greater influence than those which environ us after birth. 
These are integral parts of our being. The difference in 
these conditions makes the individuality of mankind. 
Were they the same, all men would be identically the 
same. The permutation of an infinite series of causes never 
repeats a number in the series. Hence one man is no more 
to blame for being unlike another than the oak is to blame 
for being different from the pine, or the leopard for being 
unlike the antelope on which it preys. 



120 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

Character found in oak, pine, leopard, or man, alike is 
the expression of conditions pre-natal and environing. As 
the acorn treasures all the forces which have developed it 
into a germ capable of producing an oak, so the child is a 
treasure of forces which will develop a man, and such a 
man as this treasury compels. There is another aspect to 
this subject. The acorn, germinating in a barren soil, 
strives according to the impulse of the forces by virtue of 
which it is an acorn to perfect an oak ; but hard as it may 
strive to gather sustenance from the crevices of the rocks, 
its knotty roots can support little more than a gnarled and 
blighted stem bearing dwarfish branches. What should 
have been a tree, lofty and gigantic, is blighted into a piti- 
ful shrub. 

The same acorn germinating in a fertile soil, watered by 
the same showers, refreshed by the same dew, and enjoying 
the same sunshine and shade, with every condition save one 
the same, strikes deep roots down into the earth, and on 
them towers a column-like stem supporting a forest of 
branches. So the child constantly suffering the pangs of 
want is dwarfed and distorted, not only physically, but to 
the centre of its spiritual nature. The same child sur- 
rounded by ennobling influences might astonish the world 
with its genius. Circumstances make the Alexanders, the 
Napoleons, Platos, Ciceros, the warrioft and sages of the 
world, but they can do nothing without a preexisting indi- 
viduality organized in harmony with their requirements. 

It was not my choice whether born a serf in Russia, a 
slave in the swamps of Carolina, or as I am. Had I been 
born a serf, so far from thinking of fate, I should have a 
brute instinct for my native cot, and consider my horizon 
the limits of the world. So of all conditions in which a 
human being may be placed ; they are ever true to the con- 
ditions of their position. Ah ! then what becomes of poor 
human accountability ? If we are thus creatures of fate, we 
may make no endeavor of our own, but, like listless Turks 



V 



-man's free acemcy. 121 

sit still and let the world move. This is* not a necessary 
sequence to the doctrine of necessity. Although Nature 
teaches a clear lesson, it is not sufficiently clear that "those 
who run can read" rightly. True, an individual maybe- 
come so imbued with the idea of fate as to consider exer- 
tion on his part unnecessary, and remain perfectly passive. 
The idea becomes with him the moving cause. This, how- 
ever, is a partial view of the subject, leaving out entirely 
the influence of individual exertion. Man is a centrestance 
as well as a circumstance. The forces concentrated in him 
react on surrounding conditions. The philosopher, for in- 
stance, is born with the capabilities of becoming a philoso- 
pher; he is as ignorant at first as the slave child. In actual 
acquisition both children are alike; but one child has the 
desire for and capacity to receive knowledge — the other has 
not. The desire may be strong, yet obstacles oppose with 
stronger force, and the "mute, inglorious " ISTewtons fail 
to rise above the common level. Knowledge is an efficient 
circumstance of Fate, and furnishes the strongest incentive 
for exertion. 

This question in its broad domain includes the entire 
doctrine of good and evil, and the measure of man's respon- 
sibility. 

If we acknowledge — and it is unavoidable — the necessity 
for all that has been, is, and will be, we cannot stray far 
from a knowledge of the true position. If, on the contrary, 
we consider ourselves free and independent agents, with 
such an erroneous guide we cannot avoid going astray. 
Bound hand and foot by the gigantic forces of Nature, turn 
which way we will there is no outlet. Yet, are we not 
footballs, impelled hither and thither as this or that force 
predominates ? The ball is a passive instrument, a mass of 
matter opposing only the resistance of gravity. Man is a 
football for the play of the elements, but he, by the concen- 
tration of circumstances, becomes more than a circunV 
s.tance, and therefore reacts on the elemental blows. 



122 CAREER OP RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

Our existence is the resultant of forces ar»d events reach" 
ing back to the dawn of time. These events are evolved in 
us — are united and individualized. Hence we are not 
inactive footballs. The elements strike at us ; we parry the 
blow or bend it to our purpose. 

Here lies the deception. We rush abroad in wild free- 
dom, doiDg as we please ; so we flatter ourselves. He is 
insane who doubts our free-agency. Our ships outride 
contending billows ; the winds are our slaves ; fire, fierce and 
insatiate, our vassal ; and the red lightnings of the storm 
are grasped in the giant hand of man. Such is our vaunt. 
Is it true ? Very true, but not all the truth. I draw no 
circle prescribing the capacity of the human mind. It is 
incomprehensible ; its dominion is wide, and day by day 
extending from its pulsating centre; yet how small the area 
it has conquered to the vast unknown which environs it ! 
How weak its power of resistance to the resistance it meets ! 
Like a man beneath an avalanche, it can assert its might, 
but the avalanche crushes onward. Man may roll a stone, 
but the mountain never. The stone which he can turn and 
the cloud-capped mountain hold like comparison, as the 
realm — wherein, by virtue of his centiestantial qualities, he 
is free — holds to the surrounding province which rules him 
adamantinely. 

In this small realm, wherein we are apparently free, lies 
the fallacy of our free-agency. Here, too, originated the 
primitive conception of our responsibility for our actions. 
This we know : free or not, we are held responsible. 
"Whether we act from choice or direct compulsion, know- 
ingly or unknowingly, we bear the consequences. Is this 
doubted ? 

Take an individual at random from the mass. He is as 
he is, not from his own choice. He is the culmination of a 
line of progenitors, of the infinite number of conditions ia 
which it is possible for him to be placed. Let us take ex- 
tremes — one very good, one very bad. Born with an 



man's responsibility. 123 

inharmonious organization, possessing depraved passions 
and insatiate lusts cultivated by his ancestors and poured 
down to bim in a corrupting sewer of slimy filth, he matures 
not into manhood, but into a beast. All the noble qualities 
of his mind are crushed and blighted, and he lives only for 
sensual pleasures. A born robber or murderer, he has all 
the ferocity and cunning of the wild beast. Miscreated are 
such ; cast into the world like rude, half-finished pottery. 
As much to blame the wind for blowing, as much sinful the 
tiger devouring the kid, as they. Yet Nature holds them 
to account, and compels rendition of the last farthing. As 
inexorable as the artificial law which gibbets the felon, she 
hangs the offender in the scorching deserts of passion, there 
to await until appetite has consumed itself by its own fires. 
Then the higher nature awakes, and guides the torn offen- 
der fco paths of peace. 

The harmoniously born, inheriting from noble ancestors 
all the qualities the heart cherishes, mature to manhood, 
and live to perform works of goodness. Blessings fall on 
such in a perfect stream and are received by them, that 
thereby better work may be accomplished and still greater 
blessings fall. 

It is glorious to be rightly born ; terrible to be otherwise, 
and held to the rack for the faults of others. Yet the 
greater part of man's trangressions are aneestral. Circum- 
stances over which we have as little control as over our 
unconsulted birth impart new directions. Born in a den of 
vice and infamy, the individual may, by inherent qualities 
or central impetus, burst the restraints of villainy, and 
*burn a pure star of light over a sea of corruption. If 
deficient in these qualities, then the central fires and the 
external burn in unison, and the lowest Stygian depths of 
perversion or depravity are reached. Surroundings may 
correct a disordered organization. If we trace our most 
evanescent thoughts, we find that they are evoked by sur- 
roundings. Fate casts us into the world, caring not 



124 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

whether we awake in a palace or a manger — with a silver 
spoon or a wooden platter, or without platter or provender 
at all. Stern, inexorable mother, she forces existence upon 
us, and then rings the terrible mandate in our ears : "You 
cannot die ; you can suffer ; you can enjoy — work." 

We are from our germinal beginning strained to this rack 
of iron, and throughout our existence force sustains the 
empire thus early usurped. Forced into existence and 
forced to die, of the limited space between these events how 
little our control ! We cannot command our senses, or 
prevent the brain from receiving the impressions which 
they convey. 

Man's distribution on the globe holds him under check 
of iron law. The Southern hemisphere and the Northern 
torrid zone, or the whole globe south of the tropic of 
Cancer, has yielded no grand civilization, neither has the 
Arctic Circle. A narrow belt of country along the Medi- 
terranean Sea, across Europe, and extending into the same 
latitudes of North America, is the whole area of history. 
Man outside of this little blot on the map of the globe has 
done nothing worthy of record. Why, unless mentality is 
amenable to physical laws ? And here we approach the 
gulf said to separate the moral from the physical man. A 
careful study will show that no such gulf exists. Physical 
conditions affect morality and intellect in the measure they 
do the body. The heat of the torrid enervates ; the cold of 
the frigid produces torpidity. The two extremes are equal- 
ized in the temperate. Man having acquired the control of 
forces, supplying himself with light and heat, breaks the 
fetters with which Nature binds him. Being enabled to 
carry the heat and light of the sun with him by means of 
his knowledge of fire, he penetrates the frozen North. He 
invents clothing and dwellings, devoting almost his entire 
energies in overcoming the antagonism of surrounding 
Nature. If he has free-will, it is in this combat ; but even 
here he engages in the same manner as animals do, there 



MORALITY DEPENDENT ON PHYSICAL CONDITIONS. 125 

being only a difference in degree. He is as irresistibly 
impelled as they by motives which originate in his environ- 
ment or that of his ancestors. Man realizes the feasibility 
of a dam across a river, and constructs it. He is actuated 
by motives of advantage ; so is the beaver. There is this 
difference : shut the beaver in a room, and it will construct 
a dam across one corner, out of whatever material it can 
find ; man must realize the advantage to be gained by so 
doing. The beaver is impelled by blind desire inherited 
from progenitors ; man, by equally blind thirst for property 
and power, also inherited from ancestors. 

Nationalities are moulded by their geography, and it is 
not left to individual choice to select race or locality. No 
choice of Lapp or Finn that they were driven to the most 
inhospitable climate of Europe, and have become degraded 
by their stern surroundings ; no fault of the Irish that by 
oppression they have sunk from the rank of a leading Celtic 
people to such wretchedness ; or of the Red Indians that 
they melt away before a more civilized race. " Scientific 
physiology has no better ascertained fact than that man 
possesses no innate resistance to change. The moment he 
leaves his accustomed place of abode to encounter new 
physical conditions and altered modes of life, that moment 
his structure commences slowly to change." 

Any system of reasoning which severs the constitution of 
man, placing the dismembered parts under the control of 
separate systems of government, is fundamentally false. 
Man, physically, intellectually, and morally, is an indivisi. 
ble unit, and to be understood correctly must be studied as 
such. 

From a thousand grand paternal sources the stream of 
our being flows and bends. "We sleep when drowsy ; we 
eat when hungry ; we drink when thirsty. For a moment 
we may will contrary to the desire, but the next moment 
the will is paralyzed, and the desire becomes paramount to 
everything else. Will against sleep closing the eyelids, the 



126 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

gnawings of hunger, the burnings of thirst ? Pretty free- 
agents are we ! 

So far Destiny is supreme. We die. Can we control the 
event ? The suicide is the tool of motives. Thales said 
life and death were the same ; and when asked why, then, 
he did not kill himself, he replied that, as living and dying 
were the same, he had no motive for so doing. Does fever 
burn us in its furnace, consumption prey on our vitals, or 
miasm rankle in our veins — can we will them away ? We 
may acquire a knowledge of their laws, and avert their 
penalties. 

"The only way to govern Nature is to obey her laws." 
The forces of the external wc*:ld move in certain channels, 
in which, if we are placed, we are certainly and directly 
impelled, but we must not cross the lines. As soon as we 
depart a hair's-breadth, we meet the rude buffet of the 
elements. We are bound to this rack of existence until 
death. Until death ? We cannot die. The soul, like the 
elements which gave it birth, is immortal. 

We readily admit that the elements and the vegetable and 
animal worlds are impelled by these masters with definite 
and undeviating certainty ; but we hesitate to admit that 
we, with our apparently independent will, are thus con- 
trolled. In a moment of egotism we ask : "Are we not 
capable of doing as we please, and are we not responsible 
for the consequences ? Are we not, like the gods, capable 
of willing and doing ? Have we not vast and unavoid- 
able responsibilities ?" Pleasing questions to vanity are 
these, but they apply to the grasshopper as well as the 
man. 

But we arrive at moral considerations. Is there a 
province here outside of and unamenable to law ? Shall 
we apply law everywhere else, and leave this province to 
the wild caprice of the individual ? The statistics of the 
world show the unflinching supremacy of order here as 
elsewhere. The number and atrocity of crimes vary with 



THE INDIVIDUAL IS ACCOUNTABLE TO LAW. 12* 

the season, and the age of the criminals, with mathematical 
certainty. The seeming irregularity of individual phenom- 
ena confuses the superficial gaze. We cannot say of an 
individual that he will commit a crime, but we know that 
of a certain number of individuals one each year will 
commit a given crime ; for, extended over a sufficient 
length of time, the force impelling to crime is an invariable 
Quantity. 

Even the mistakes of men are controlled by laws dimly 
seen in gathered statistics. 

To the grand sum of Nature our individualities are noth- 
ing. To obtain the truth we must look to the eternal, and 
not to the evanescent flashes of the hour. Human pleas- 
ures, passions, wants, emotions, are fleeting expressions, 
and valueless except as they direct us to the constant, the 
inexorable law. 

Of the brute we expect brute actions. What shall we 
expect of the man with the organization of the brute ? We 
cannot avoid the conclusion that, whatever be the relations 
of spirit and brain, the manifestations of mind are depend- 
ent on organization. Anatomists have remarked the 
approach of the idiotic brain to that of the lower animals. 
The brains of savage peoples — Indians, negroes, &c— ap- 
proach those of the Caucasian infants. These facts point 
unerringly to the supremacy of law in the moral and intel- 
lectual worlds. We are accountable, but not in the manner 
we are to artificial laws. We are accountable to laws 
which form an integral part of our constitution, and to 
none other. We cannot move in channels other than 
those marked out by the laws of our nature without 
pain. 

By the possession of intellect we are removed above the 
realm of brutal desires. 



CHAPTER XI. 

DUTIES AND OBLIGATIONS OF MAN TO GOD ANJ) TO 
HIMSELF. 

I am satisfied that Cambyses was deprived of his reason ; he 
would not otherwise have disturbed thesanetity of the temples 
or of established customs.— Hebodotus. 

Theology claims certain duties which man owes to God. 
The requirements made at different times have been 
extremely variable and almost endless. In the early and 
savage age, man fancied God to be like himself, only more 
savage aod demoniac. His anger was to be appeased ; not 
his goodness trusted. The best of the harvest and of the 
flock was set apart for him. The smoke of incense arose 
from his altars, and the blood of slaughtered victims — too 
often human — stained his shrine. By this method these 
child-men believed they best pleased their child-God. After 
a time the sacrifice is found to become more personal and 
of higher tone. Whatever is held dear is yielded to the 
selfishness of God. The world becomes a serpent's den of 
temptation. God demands everything, and everything 
must be yielded up to him. He created man for his sole 
pleasure and profit, and it is man's duty to obey. If he 
knew the law — as recorded and interpreted by the priest — 
was God's law, things would be different. Always the 
priest must stand between us and God. We must drink the 
water as it percolates through finite channels, often reeking 
with corruption. 

The priest has said : " Thus saith the Lord," and men 
have run gladly to death. However united they have been 



MAN CAN DO NOTHING FOR GOD. 129 

in crushing mankind in ignorance, they have been incon- 
sistent in their interpretation of God's demands. He re- 
quires of ihe Catholic, fasts, feasts, and holy days innum- 
erable ; of the Puritan, rest on Sunday ; of the Jew, rest on 
Saturday, and circumcision ; of the Moslem, pilgrimages 
to Mecca ; of the Hindoo widow, the burning of herself on 
her husband's luneral pyre ; of the devotee, to plunge into 
the holy Gauges ; of the South Sea islander, to knock out a 
front tooth or cut off a finger ; of a modern Christian, to 
build churches arid make prayers at stated seasons. 

To review the various opinions of the different peoples 
of the world — to see the craft and cunning, the villainy and 
arrogance of the priesthood, and the ignorance and folly of 
of the many, presents a sickening picture, from which we 
turn with disgust. If God has made any revelation of his 
will regarding the duties man owes to him, he has made it 
in such a manner that there can be no mistake, nor need of 
any class of men to act as interpreters. 

God knows what man wants, quite as well as the priests, 
however well educated they may be. With astonishing 
audacity they place themselves between God and man to 
make plain what He had not power to render intelligible. 
God's laws need no special interpretation, but are as far- 
reaching as space, and ubiquitous in" their operation. If He 
makes demands, the mortal need not fear the demand will 
be unsatisfied. We can do nothing for God. As finite 
beings, the sum of all our efforts would count as nought to 
the Infinite. Ten thousand roasting lambs or ten thousand 
crucified Christs are all the same to him. He must from 
his very nature remain the same— impassive and immovable. 
Our duty performed or neglected only affects ourselves. 
We can dash ourselves to pieces against a mountain, but 
the mountain remains unmoved. 

Let us at once free ourselves from the old idea that God 
directly interests himself in mortal affairs and can be 
reached by prayer. A verbal prayer may seem to refresh 



130 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS, 

the heart, but goes no further. God will not turn aside 
though the whole world cry "Turn." The supposition that 
He will is a superstition descended from Fetish-worship- 
ing savages. We come in direct contact with laws un- 
swerving and adamantine. They prescribe our duty, which 
is implicit obedience. All outside and extraneous observ- 
ances are absolute folly. When the law has been complied 
with, duty has been done. No fasting, prayer, or Sunday 
sermon is required. 

Duty to God, in the sense taught by the priesthood, is 
meaningless, except as it gives them an interpreter's posi- 
tion and pay. Ceremonies, observances, and customs 
made and kept because God is supposed to demand them, 
are worse than follies — they are infantile stupidities. 

Duty ! In that one name more crime has been com- 
mitted, more misery created, than in any other. All the 
persecutions of the world have been carried forward to 
compel man to obey God. Jesus was nailed to the cross 
that the Jews might not fail in their time-honored temple, 
worship ; and the petty churches of to-day wrangle and 
would crucify each other remorselessly for rejection of 
their peculiar views. Little cares the Infinite whether a 
mortal is sprinkled in the face, plunged in the water, or 
neither sprinkled nor plunged ; whether he works on Sat- 
urday or Sunday ; whether he circumcises, knocks out a 
tooth, cuts off a finger, or says grace. 

Obedience to God can only mean observance of the laws 
of our being. The only duty we owe is such obedience ; 
and it is time we cast aside the trappings, the ceremonies, 
and observances which mislead and divert. Here we can- 
not mistake our duty. We stand face to face with these 
laws, and need no priest between them and us. If we 
obey, we at once reap the reward ; if we fail v we at once 
incur the penalty. If in our extremity our lips utter a 
prayer, it is from habit acquired in childish days, which we 
know to be as valueless to help us as the breath which 



ARROGANCE OF THE PRIESTHOOD. 131 

gives it sound. Our obligations to God are not prayer or 
praise, but the fulfilling of the laws which created and 
sustains us. 

By such conduct shall we please him ? The Christian 
world answers, " No. God is pleased with lofty spires 
grandly towering above a vain and thoughtless world, with 
regular attendance at church, long prayers, and sancti- 
monious face. He wishes man to do everything for His 
glory and love of Christ, and He bestows salvation, not 
because deserved, but as a special favor. " In olden times 
He was pleased with the fattened calf, the firstlings of the 
flock, and the fragrance of smoking blood and roasting offal. 
The flippancy of the priesthood is equaled by their arro- 
gance. They assume to be the only interpreters of God's 
will, which cannot be written, and can only be learned by 
contact with Nature. His will is expressed by the term 
Law, and is co-eternal with matter. There can be no law 
foreign and unwrought into the constitution of the world, 
nor can man be held amenable to laws which are not a part 
and portion of himself. Obedience is from necessity, and 
not for the ' * glory of God." Is this church God an Asiatic 
monarch so jealous that we must bow before his throne 
servilely to gain his approval ? A God making such a 
botch of creation that we, his misbegotten, abortive crea- 
tions, creep to bis feet to ask his pardon for his having 
thus shammed us, of all others is the most loathsome. 

"No," cries the soul ; "you please not God by long 
prayers or ghastly faces, sepulchral tones, or sermons 
beneath lofty steeples. The Infinite breathes through all 
Nature, and obedience to his will is our ultimate necessity. 
The world is beautiful, and man walks therein a beautiful 
spirit. God is not pleased to have that spirit become a 
blear-eyed bigot, or this beautiful world viewed through 
the muddy waters of Fanaticism stirred by the craft and 
arrogance of a self-nominated priesthood. He is pleased 
with a well-ordered life." 



132 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS\ 

While it is claimed that religion necessarily embraces 
morality, morality by no means embraces religion. A man 
may clearly observe the distinction between right and 
wrong, walk uprightly, deal honestly, act benevolently, 
and have an unblemished moral character ;. but if all thk 
does not result from a sense of love and dependence on 
God, he is not religious. Doing right because right, and 
avoiding wrong because wrong, is not sufficient. The 
action must be based on love and dependence on Godr If 
man possessed an absolute and complete revelation fiom 
God for his guidance there would be no reason for disobey- 
ing or question of dependence ; but, fortunately, the Bible, 
as interpreted by the thousand wrangling sects it has origi- 
nated, furnishes no such criterion; and Nature makes no 
revelation except as yielded by closest research and patient 
investigation. 

Having discovered such laws, it may be asked whether 
man should obey them because such is the constitution of 
things, or because of his dependence on God. If from the 
first cause, he is only moral ; if from the latter, he is 
religious. Here is an entirely artificial distinction. Does 
God demand servile dependence ? If so, is it not strange 
that only a privileged class have learned this lesson ? They, 
never having come in contact with God, assume to tell what 
He demands, what will please and what displease Him, 
and the form of religion He prescribes. If God has made a 
revelation, it is in harmony with the laws of the world. 
They, as expressions of his unchanging purpose, are 
finalities. What more can be required than obedience to 
them ? v 

We come in contact with fire, and are burned. Hence- 
forth, understanding its nature, we avoid it. Shall we do 
so to please God, or because of our own preservation ? 
Shall we do right for God's sake or our own — for Christ's 
sake or for humanity's ? 

Through trial and suffering we gain an understanding of 



OF WHAT AVAIL IS PRAYER ? 138 

Our physical, intellectual, and moral relations. If a human 
father should write a code for the guidance of his children, 
would he not be better pleased if obedience were given be- 
cause they considered it right, than because it was his will, 
to which they servilely yielded ? But, it is said in reply, 
"God's ways are not man's ways." Why, then, attempt 
to reason about our relations to him ? Unless God's reason 
is like our reason we can know nothing about his demands. 
The human father would say, " My son, there is no honor 
in servile obedience. I am not to be considered. Do right 
because it is right, and you will please me more than by 
the most slavish submission simply because it is your 
father's will." 

Has God more self-consciousness and vanity than man ? 
Can He be flattered by the " sense of dependence " on 
man ? 

The value of this " sense of dependence " and the true 
position of the "religious element inherent in man" have 
been shown in the first chapter, and are proved to be as 
varying as the geographical locality or color of the race. 
Salvation is not a gift bestowed out of favor. If we do 
right, we earn and command it. 

Shall we live for the glory of God ? Nay, for our own. 
The Infinite cannot be glorified. 

If the order of Nature is unchangeable, of what avail is 
prayer ? Apollonius, who was not enlightened by the mys 
teries of Christian revelation, truthfully said of prayer : 
" A man may worship the Deity far more truly than other 
mortals, though he neither sacrifice animals nor consecrate 
any outward thing to that God whom we call the First. . 
. . Pure spirit, the most beautiful portion of our being, 
has no need of external organs to make itself understood 
by the Omnipresent Essence." Porphyry says of prayer: 
" It produces a sort of union between the gods and the just, 
who resemble them." Prayer— the earnest desire of the 
heart — the prophecy of possibilities — is quite different from 



134 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

the spoken verbiage which a parrot may learn as well. The 
child, too young to understand the meaning of words, is 
taugh-fc that there is efficacy in a little prayer lisped on re- 
tiring. What does it know of the Infinite ? Is there not a 
striking similarity between the situation of the child lisp- 
ing a prayer it does not comprehend — addressed to a Being 
it does not know — and the grave deacon repeating in 
church-meeting a memorized formula for the thousandth 
time, praising the forbearance of that unknown Being, and 
demeaning his sinful self ? How far removed is the pom- 
pous preacher reciting his well-learned lesson beseeching 
God's mercy by rote ? They all think they are doing what 
is best for them — what their religious education requires ; 
and are equally self-satisfied as the Red Indian who prays to 
Quahootze, or the Chinese bowing to his Joss-stick. In 
some countries written prayers are attached to a wheel 
turned by water-power, and every minute of the day a 
prayer is presented to the sky. Who can say that the pray- 
ing wheel is not as efficacious as the praying parson ? The 
requirements of prejudice are fulfilled by their several 
methods. Some striving soul may have found relief in for- 
mulated prayer, and thus it came into general use. Some 
may yet find in it relief. It has become a part of religion. 
Family service is as essential as church-going, and is the 
means whereby the theological crust is formed around the 
young mind, in after years to harden and press out its spir- 
itual energies. 

We change nothing by prayer but ourselves. We cannot 
in the least affect external Nature. If a ship were freighted 
with a thousand saints, their united prayers would not 
keep her afloat if there was a plank torn from her side. 
The Divine Power moves on as heedless of our demands as 
a locomotive of the school-boy's cry. 

If prayer gives us strength and courage, it _is well ; but 
far better the self-reliance of the strong soul depending on 
no external power. 



SUNDAY A PAGAN FESTIVAL. 135 

Nature has no especially holy days, for with her all days 
are sacred. The learned and exceedingly pious Neander 
says that " The celebration of Sunday— like that of every 
festival — was a human institution. Far was it from the 
Apostles to treat it as a divine command ; far from them 
and from the first Apostolic Church to transfer the laws of 
the Sabbath to Sunday." Sunday was a Pagan festive day 
and was adopted by the Christians on that account. The 
Romans, according to a very ancient custom, named the 
days of the week after their various deities. The first day 
was Dies Solis, or the Sun's Day. As Apollo became more 
popular, the day of his worship was held in greater esteem. 
Constantine early adopted the Sun as his emblem and 
Apollo as his protector, and until fifty years of age strictly 
adhered to their worship. "When he was converted to 
Christianity he would not renounce the day he had always 
held sacred, and one of the first acts of his reign was to 
compel its observance. No allusion was made to Chris- 
tianity in the edict which was prompted by a lingering love 
of the old religion of the hero gods. The courts were 
closed on that day except for the manumission of slaves, 
and military exercises forbidden. The Christian bishops, 
who saw in the Emperor an incarnate divinity, adopted the 
day to please their Roman converts. It is a Pagan day 
devoted to Apollo, or the Sun, and they who keep it in no 
sense fulfil the command— " Remember the Sabbath day, 
to keep it holy." 

There is no command in the Bible to observe the first day 
of the week. The old Jewish Fetishism is transferred 
from the Sabbath to Sunday, and the church-goers of the 
present think the day far more sacred than any other. 
Even their house used on that day is sacred. They meet 
God there more directly than anywhere else. They do not 
believe the old Pagan notion that He loves incense and the 
smoke of burnt offerings, but they do believe that He enjoys 
their praises of him and depreciation of their own worm- 



136 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

like selves. The day is holy, and so strong is this preju- 
dice that the laws for its observance form one of the f ew 
instances where religion interferes with affairs of American 
State. Nature has no Sabbath. The winds blow, the 
waters run, it rains and is calm, the leaves and flowers 
expand, the birds sing, on Sunday as well as on all other 
days. What is wrong on Sunday is wrong on week days ; 
and not until the processes of Nature point out the day of 
rest should legal enactment seek to make it holy. Until 
then, Sunday laws are a scandal on civil liberty. 

Of faith, it is said it transcends knowledge, and is the 
only means whereby man's relations to God can be made 
known. Far more correct to say that faith, the acceptance 
of authority, has cursed mankind. The more unreasonable 
and absurd the statement, the more loudly has the receiving 
faith been extolled. The salvation of the soul has been 
made to depend on faith, as opposed to reason. Belief 
depending on reason can be caused only by sufficiency of 
evidence ; it cannot be coerced nor gained by the will. 
The faith which receives the improbable is attained by 
narcotizing the reason. But it is claimed that man's 
eternal welfare depends on his acceptance of certain 
doctrines. He must believe in God, in Christ, the resur- 
rection, and many other minor dogmas, else he will assur 
edly be damned. 

If he cannot believe, what then ? Believing or non-be- 
lieving is involuntary. One man may have an all-receiv- 
ing faith without reason to trouble him, while another's 
reasoning powers are so active that he receives nothing 
without the closest scrutiny. Is one more blameable than 
the other ? Faith is a blind guide, and is no criterion of 
truth. It has, in their time, received a stone, a garlic, a 
cloud, a bull Apis for gods. The myths of the Olympian ■ 
Court; the fables of the Incarnation of Brahma in Christna; 
the revelations of Zoroaster, of Moses, of Mohammed ; all 
religious systems, the world over — unlike in everything 



CHRISTIANITY CHANGING GROUND. 1ST 

else — agree in this ; the faith, or, in other words, blind, 
unquestioning belief of their devotees. When Abelard 
began to prove theology by reason, he was hushed by the 
priests, who said if he proved the reasonable by reason, he 
would reject the unreasonable by the same, and this was by 
no means admissible. 

If Christianity had always made the same demands on 
faith, it might at least plead consistency. It has not. 
Forced onward by the growth of the race, it has from age 
to age been compelled to change its ground. It has 
required acceptance of miracles, a personal God and Devil, 
witchcraft, the real presence, eternal punishment, predes- 
tination, total depravity, infant damnation, and countless 
other dogmas which have lived their day, been outgrown, 
and sunk into oblivion. Yet in the day of each, salvation 
was made to depend on theii acceptance. As faith can 
only be possessed at the expense of reason, it must always 
be pernicious, baleful, and blasting. The belief in its ne- 
cessity, united with the dogma of free-will and free-agency, 
has worked untold misery and ruin. 

Science, on the contrary, demands impartial statements, 
leaving the judgment free. When mankind reach this firm 
ground, and are able to give a reason for their beliefs, no 
doubts will cloud their clear sky, nor will they apostatize. 
Then they will arrive at an understanding of true holiness 
and purity, and find the theological standard only a carica- 
ture. Not the observance of formulated ceremonies, the 
saying of long prayers, the keeping of saint's days, mckes 
man holy. The devotee who performs weary pilgrimages 
to the Ganges to wash away his sins is none the better for 
his pains. The convert to Christianity gees down into the 
water for like motives, but comes out none the better. 
Holiness is nearness and likeness to God — in other words, 
to perfection. None of these forms bridge the profound 
gulf. They may have been helps to those who first used 
them, but are dry and soulless to those who follow. The 



188 CAREER Otf RELIGIOUS tDEAS. 

Stylite, the hermit, the Flagellant, devoutly sought holiness 
in their various ways— unwisely sought by faith. The 
world moved on, and in a better age said of them : "Not, O 
Stylite, on your pillar's windy summit ; not, O hermiU in 
your lonely cave ; not, Flagellant, in the pangs of lac- 
erated flesh, is the perfection sought by you attained. Beau- 
tiful to the eye of Infinite Cause is the pure essence of 
spiritual life ; but equally beautiful the bonds of flesh 
which hold it to earth. It loves the earthly clay as well as 
spiritual life." 

Holiness and purity begin with the body. Gall in the 
stomach creates gall in the mind, and the demons of per- 
secution have many a time been unleashed by the fever of 
indigestion. The olden saint was a crucified wretch, 
suffering unutterable misery. He had but to show his neck 
cut to the bone by his hair-cloth shirt to be recognized. 
Thorns pierced his brow ; the lash tore his back ; hunger 
gnawed at his vitals ; the world itself sank into indefinite 
proportions ; and the demons of hell ever howled around 
the soul that thus endeavored to escape. 

Purity has been sought by renouncing the world and 
retiring from its allurements. The rocky cavern, the cell 
of the monastery, the solitude of forest and desert, all 
have had their fanatical devotees, who, unable to conquer 
themselves in the world, voluntarily banished themselves 
out of it. An individual may preserve himself unsullied 
in the darkness of a cavern simply because un tempted. 
He is no better or worse for that. It is not what a man 
does, but what he is. Doing is only a revelation of the inner 
life. 

The spirit touches the material world through and by 
means of the physical body. Hence physical purity is a 
condition of spiritual growth, and its perfection the 
rhythmic harmony of all physical and spiritual functions. 
It is not bestowed by miracle. The waters of the Ganges 
or the church fount yield it not. It is an acquirement of 



HOW HOLINESS IS ATTAINED. 139 

struggle. It is tlie serene calm of a life-time of spiritual 
dictatorship, wherein all the untoward promptings of 
menial desires have been subdued by the supreme power of 
reason. 

Holiness is only attainable by obedience to the laws of 
our being. The Anchorite is as reprehensible as the 
debauchee. The command is : not crush, but govern; the 
proper subjection of tne physical and spiritual by harmon- 
ious action. 

The saint of the past was known by the marks of seif - 
inflicted physical torture ; the saint of the present believes 
a long face, interminable prayers, and seir-sacrmce accept- 
able to God, entirely forgetful of his body, wnich may be 
a whitened sepulchre reeking with corruption. The saint 
of the future will hold his body as noble as his spirit, and 
of equal importance. The bravest soul is useless in a cor- 
rupted body. 

Science resolves faith into accurate knowledge — duty into 
obedience. Piety, wnich in its lowest stage is servile rev- 
erence and love of G-od, is exalted to a willing obedience — 
not because demanded by a Superior Being, but because the 
requirement of the constitution of things. Religion, if in 
this new sense that term may be employed, is the ceaseless 
effort for purity and integrity of being, and harmony with 
the order of the world. 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE ULTIMA TE OF RELIGIO US IDEAS. 

"Ye are gods, and behold, ye shall die, and the waves be 

upon you at last. 
In the darkness of time, in the deeps of the years, in the 

changes of things. 
Ye shall sleep as slain men sleep, and the world shall forget 

you for kings." 

The progress of thought is in cycles, and history con- 
stantly repeats itself in what may be termed crises. Nearly 
two thousand years have passed since the dawn of the 
Christian Era, and we find society again entering a similar 
plane of organic disruption to that which prostrated the 
magnificent mythology of the Eoman world. The wise 
Polybius records that it was allowable for writers to 
enlarge on miracles and fables to promote piety; and Strabo 
that women and the people generally could only be led to 
piety by myths and fables. It was an age of organized 
hypocrisy. The philosophers had no faith in the religion 
they encouraged in the people. Statesmen employed it as a 
convenience in the machinery of government. Augurs and 
priests smiled when they met. Authors ridiculed the 
legends of the gods to each other, while they wrote in 
exquisite prose and verse in their favor. The State 
became disintegrated, from the throne of Caesar to the 
hut of the peasant ; and hypocrisy so skillfully concealed 
the decay that no one saw the imminence of change. 

After a wide circle, society again repeats this state of 
things. It has become an organized hypocrisy. In the United 



HYPOCRISY AND CANT. 141 

States, sixty thousand priests daily teach what their reason 
declares false. They have grasped the schools ; they 
manufacture opinion, and throttle the Press. Dare the 
statesmen, lawyers, physicians, or authors come in collision 
with public opinion ? Not they. The statesman wants 
office more than manhood, and joins the rabble to gain 
votes. He will even attend revivals, and become "con- 
verted," if he attain his ends thereby. Although a skeptic 
at heart, he is a ready tool to enact church-favoring laws. 
The lawyer seeks credit by owning a pew, and sleeping in 
it two hours each Sunday. To the physician, to be religious 
is a fair advertisement. The author, most sensitive to the 
breath of criticism, finds the popular side yield most honor 
and profit. The merchant finds a high-priced pew a good 
investment ; and even the mechanic obtains more constant 
employment by belonging to some church. 

While all detest this tyranny, and loathe themselves for 
yielding to its pressure, they consent to be slaves to each 
other. They feel they are hypocrites, but know not ho^r 
to shake the horrid vampire off; and if they knew they dare 
not. The honest mechanic would lose his rank ; the mer- 
chant's goods would remain on his shelves ; the physician 
would have no patients, the author no readers ; and this, 
too, most paradoxically, in the midst of those who at heart 
believe just as they do, and who secretly honor them for 
openly avowing their belief. The members of the social 
fabric mutually consent to live lives of debasing hypoc- 
risy, and to make their conversation unmitigated cant. 

Our aim has been to show the baselessness of all extra- 
neous systems of morals and worthlessness of religious 
opinions, as such, distinct from morality based on intel- 
lectuality. To gather up the scattered threads of evidence, 
the ultimate of our position may be briefly stated : 

The ultimate of the God-idea is negation. The savage 
believes everything is God, and soon arrogantly claims to 
Understand his will and purpose. As he advances in. 



142 CAREER OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

knowledge and civilization, he distrusts his capability to 
grasp the infinite, and with his growth in wisdom perceives 
more and more his weakness. God is invariably a reflec- 
tion of the mind of the worshiper; and when the worshiper, 
instead of erecting altars and shrines, and addressing 
prayers to an ideal being, sets himself at work to purify 
and render himself divine, the end has been attained. 

The Christ-idea, developed from a part of the God-idea — 
the approach of the Infinite to man through the medium 
of the flesh— is an imperfect expression of the divinity of 
man, of the infinite possibilities of his nature, and reaches 
its end when those great truths are received and embodied 
in noble and true lives. 

Religious ideas are outgrowths of fancied relations 
between man and God. They rest on the assumption, 
expressed or understood, that God is a personal being, and 
interferes with the actions of men and the course of 
Nature, in whole or in part by miracle. Religious rites 
and observances can have but two motives — to appease the 
displeasure or gain the esteem of the gods, or God. 

God must be personal to render such intercessions of any 
avail. The impersonality of the Infinite Cause disposes of 
ail the ceremonies and forms which pass for religion. 
The moral faculties, which from immemorial ages have 
been persecuted by superstition, are consigned to the 
intellect, and man, instead of acting to please God, does 
right because such is the legitimate requirement of his 
perfected organization. He walks out of the blighting 
shadow of ritual and creed — the blind reliance on revela- 
tion and its interpreters ; casts aside his fear of offended 
gods and demons, recognizing in himself divine powers 
which rightly used will lead him to divine ends. He does 
not determine the right and the true by written revelation, 
but by knowledge of the constitution of Nature. He is 
pure and upright, not because it pleases God, but because 
he has inherent capabilities for purity and nobleness of life. 



PKOTESTANT CHURCHES BECOMING STRICT. 143 

The observance of the fixed order of his being is the 
right and true, and the harmony of his life will proclaim 
the measure of his knowledge and obedience. 

Are these highlands of truth to be gained without a 
struggle? Are mankind to have the clouds of ignorance at 
once swept away from their mental sky ? If so, this grand- 
est of revolutions will be unique. Nay, planted on the 
impregnable rock of positive knowledge, the warfare will 
be waged between science and dogmatism, the hoarse bray 
of ignorance. Here entrenched, it has scorned to do more 
than defend itself against the moss-troopers of the religious 
marsh-land — the guerillas and bushrangers of theology. 
Gathering strength, it may become aggressive. The low 
cannonading of this struggle is heard in the distance. 
Rome, most sensitive to feel the popular breath, most 
quick to prepare for the red-handed struggle she has 
waged for her whole life against humanity, calls a great 
Council to reassert her dogmas, and give her strength to 
flesh her fangs on the first faint sign of rebellion to her 
rule. The Protestant churches are uniting and drawing 
tighter the reins of theological government. 

On the other side, men arise who dare to think, and— 
thinking — dare to speak. 

Shall we repose our confidence in Truth, and passively 
await the issue ? Truth of itself has no power. Religious 
barbarism has repeatedly conquered civilization, and set 
the hand on the dial of progress backward many a weary 
century of blood. The Truth demands exponents and 
defenders. 

Conservatism finds strength in the ignorant masses, and 
when we consider how few there are who think correctly, 
who are reliable in their judgments, unbiased and unprej- 
udiced, we tremble for the cause of mental freedom. 

Rationalism, the implacable foe of superstition, is slowly 
gathering its forces for a final struggle. The various bat- 
talions of Churchianity have waged many a hard-fought 



144 CAREER OF -RELIGIOUS IDEAS. 

battle among themselves — have looked upon each other 
with spiteful hate — for slightest differences of opinion 
condemned each to a place it is almost profane to mention; 
but now, under the pressure of the accumulating power of 
Rationalism, they send their bugle blasts down the gale, 
calling their scattered hosts together, and wheeling their 
pliant subjects into line. Old and New School Presbyte- 
rians on the right; Episcopalians in the centre; Metho- 
dists, Baptists, and scattered divisions of various sects on 
the left; a picket line of Swedenborgians; while the whole 
is supported by the solid columns of Roman Catholicism, 
lumbering on with its heavy ordnance, its racks, gibbets, 
fagots, and dungeons. 

In this contest money is as dross, and life itself is of 
value only as it purchases freedom. We who have come 
up out of the black shadow of death, traversing the Golgo- 
tha overshadowed by the withering shade of Churchianity ; 
who are drabbled with the slime and ooze cast over us by 
the serpent-tongue of slander "for Christ's sake" — what 
are we doing? Allowing our children to travel the same 
road ! Sending them to the Sabbath-school or church, and 
permitting them to drink at will of the same poisoned 
fountain ! For their sakes, if not for our own, let us 
strive to make Rationalism a power commanding respect. 
Let us leave them the proud name of independent think- 
ers, and make it a title of honor. 

The battle is no longer waged with the uncertain wea- 
pons of theology and metaphysics, but the thinker now 
wields the Damascus blade of positive knowledge, and the 
result will be decisive. Infallible authority, antiquity, 
miracles, saints, martyrs, popes, priests, majorities, dog- 
mas, faiths, consciousness, all the trappings that have 
hitherto been received as divine, holy and sacred, will 
perish before the keen flame of what is known, and no 
more shall blight the expansive spirit, for ever, 



MOKALITY SHALL LIVE. 145 

What will be the outgrowth of this radical change, 
brought about by the accumulation of knowledge ? 

The Church, with its hollow shams, shall perish; but 
morality, the growth of intellect, freed from gross and 
perverting idolatry shall achieve a nobility of character 
unknown before. Faith in the doctrine of vicarious 
atonement, fear of offending a relentless God, the tortures 
of hell-fire, the authority of a book or a caste, shall pass 
away before the certain light of man's true relations and a 
positive development of morals. 



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